Alerts before payments are made to potential scammers have saved customers at National Australia Bank $80 million since alerts were introduced a year ago, as the bank extends the system to more types of payments.
NAB’s alert system has led to a 25 per cent fall in scam losses, including $285,000 worth of suspected ticket scams during the three months to the end of January this year – a period that included additional ticket sales for Taylor Swift concerts in Melbourne and Sydney.
“Taylor Swift scams were rife across the banking industry,” says Chris Sheehan, NAB executive, group investigations.
Chris Sheehan, NAB executive, group investigations, says initiatives at the bank to combat scams have seen a 25 per cent fall in scam losses over the past 12 months.
“Criminals love these types of marquee events as they provide an opportunity to use the fear of missing out … to their advantage,” Sheehan says.
The bank processed about one billion payments last year through its digital payment channels and flagged 18,600 scam events. Even though losses to scams are down, the number of scam events continues to rise.
Sheehan says artificial intelligence and machine learning are helping the bank understand how legitimate customers use their devices, such as mobile phones and laptops and look for unusual patterns in real time.
“We have to be selective when we fire alerts – we use our fraud models to nuance when we do that,” Sheehan says.
Customers are becoming better at ignoring suspicious calls, deleting questionable-looking emails, deleting bogus text messages, and not clicking on links in texts and emails.
The bank is also removing links from text messages, making it harder for criminals to impersonate bank phone numbers, blocking payments to some high-risk crypto platforms that are also making an impact, Sheehan says.
Source Agencies
