Online banking anti-fraud efforts stepped up

As internet banking becomes more popular, online bank fraud is on the increase. In Belgium, prosecutors say they are looking into more than a dozen cases where money appears to have gone missing from people’s accounts.

Renate Volpel was a fraud victim when she was living in Germany and said she no longer trusts internet banking security: “Someone took my number from my account and I lost some money and I couldn’t prove that it was not my fault, so I had to pay for it and I was a little bit angry about the bank. I left the bank but at the same time I decided I will never do it again.”

The banks know they are constantly under siege from high tech criminals, who also target the home computers of their customers to gain access to accounts. Viviane Huybrecht of Belgium’s KBC Group said: “We continuously invest into the security of the online system. We invest tens of millions of euros every year to make it even more secure, but it never stops.”

Banks around Europe are stepping up security. Some in the UK are giving customers special machines which they have to swipe their bank card through to generate a new pin code before they can transfer money to another bank account.

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