The U.K. has been experiencing a widespread payments fraud epidemic in recent years.
Authorized push payment (APP) fraud, for example, increased 40% between 2020 and 2021 and amounted to £583 million ($706 million) in losses in 2021, nearly half of the £1.3 billion ($1.57 billion) lost to overall fraud incidents that year, per UK Finance.
According to Kate Frankish, chief business development officer and anti-fraud lead at Pay.UK, that type of scam in which criminals trick a person or business into sending money into a fraudsters’ account can be particularly difficult to identify, especially for financial institutions (FIs).
“From a bank’s perspective, it looks like a real payment, because the customer authorized it using all of their credentials. But it’s either going to an account that doesn’t belong to them or it’s going to a real person who has been scammed out of the money,” she told PYMNTS in an interview.