The number of fraudulent payments reached \u20ac160m last year with so-called e-money fraud suffering the sharpest rise, a study by the Central Bank of Ireland shows.<\/p>\n
The biggest losses last year were credit transfers, or bank payments, followed by card payments, which made up a combined \u20ac113m. Neither saw significant increase, however, but fraudulent e-money payments rose from \u20ac3.3m in 2023 to \u20ac25.6m last year.<\/p>\n
E-money is the digital form of cash stored electronically, which can also be referred to as digital or electronic wallets.<\/p>\n
Legitimate and reputable firms such as Stripe, Facebook and Booking.com come under the umbrella of providing such services, according to the Central Bank of Ireland\u2019s \u2018E-Money Firms List.\u2019<\/p>\n
The Payment Fraud Statistic study is based on records provided by Irish resident payment service providers in conjunction with the Central Bank.<\/p>\n
The total volume of fraudulent payments rose by 40.7pc from 2023.<\/p>\n
There were a staggering 815,000 occurrences of fraud recorded last year.<\/p>\n
When broken down to individual transactions, the amount of money fraudsters were obtaining through e-money transactions was alarming.<\/p>\n
E-money had an average value of fraud at \u20ac692 in 2024, a notable spike from \u20ac142 a year earlier.<\/p>\n
The average size of bogus and misdirected direct debits also increased to \u20ac107 last year.<\/p>\n
Hackers are evolving their skills in line with the pace of technological advances including artificial intelligence (AI), according to Michael Kavanagh the CEO of the Compliance Institute, a professional body for compliance professionals that advises on regulatory and business ethics.<\/p>\n
\u201cHackers and cybercriminals are continuously improving their practices, constantly finding new ways of stealing material and outsmarting even the most advanced of security systems,” he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe growing sophistication of fraudsters means scams have become harder to spot, and therefore easier to fall for.\u201d<\/p>\n
Online payments made up 77pc of the fraudulent value last year, worth \u20ac124m, the data shows.<\/p>\n
Mr Kavanagh said advances in AI were playing a role.<\/p>\n
\u201cAI, a technology which has developed at a rapid pace in recent years, is now being increasingly used by scammers in their attempts to defraud people.\u201d<\/p>\n
Additionally, the study found that the manipulation of funds when transferring money referred to as fraudulent money remittances more than doubled from \u20ac8m to \u20ac20m last year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The number of fraudulent payments reached \u20ac160m last year with so-called e-money fraud suffering the sharpest rise, a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":84937,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[2334,61,60,43,38532],"class_list":["post-84936","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ireland","tag-artificial-intelligence-ai","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-news","tag-rory-mcginn"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84936","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=84936"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84936\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/84937"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=84936"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=84936"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=84936"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}