Recent financial crime reports have stated that phishing scams conducted via texts otherwise know as smishing is now on the rise. This is ranked amongst purchase scams, where payments are made for products that never arrive, social engineering, impersonation and account take over (ATO).
Smishing found its way into the Feedzai’s financial crime report top five list for the very first time as the fifth most common fraud scam. The analysis also revealed a 146% increase in peer-to-peer (P2P) payments and a 44% decrease in cash transactions. Online transactions grew by 109% to nearly double the number of in-person or card-present transactions.
James Ferreira the senior director of global data science at Feedzai has been quoted saying that “Cashless payments were already on the rise, but the pandemic accelerated all forms of digital transactions when lockdowns hit.”
“Millions more people experienced just how convenient digital payments and banking are when they couldn’t go to a bank branch or a restaurant or grocery store.”
Ferreira warned that the convenience of cashless transactions comes with a cost.
“Cashless transactions are not the future anymore, they are today,” he said. “Financial institutions and retailers need to address the financial risk and higher complexity attacks that arise with the digital evolution.”
In the United States alone, the analysis on the rate of fraud revealed that Las Vegas, Nevada, which has seen a fraud increase of 411%, topped the list, with New York (up 396%( and Charleston, South Carolina (up 251%) in second and third place, respectively.