FP TrendingFeb 15, 2021 19:35:32 IST

According to the Kaspersky Fraud Prevention report, account takeover incidents in the finance industry increased by 20 percent in 2020 compared to the previous year.

As per anonymised statistics of events detected by Kaspersky Fraud Prevention from January to December 2020, the share of such incidents increased from 34 percent in 2019 to 54 percent in 2020, of which two schemes to get access to a bank account  ‘the rescuer’ and ‘the investor’ remained common since 2019.

Claire Hatcher, Head of Business Development, Kaspersky Fraud Prevention, said that the solutions for the financial industry should provide a high level of security measures that should include protection against fraud that is seamlessly integrated into the user experience and is worth regularly reminding clients about fraudsters’ techniques so that they are likely to notice something.

As a result of the pandemic, the importance of e-commerce and digital financial services increased in 2020 with people spending more time at home.

According to the team, there were two common types of the approach used by attackers to obtain access to accounts in which the first tactic sees scammers disguise as ‘the rescuer’, where they pretend to be security experts and act out scenarios to ‘save’ users, while the second example is where cybercriminals act as ‘the investor’ where they posing as employees of an investment company, or an investment consultant from a bank.

As per the report, the criminals call customers and offer them a quick way to make money by investing in shares or cryptocurrency directly from the client’s account, without having to go to a bank branch.