Javelin’s Fraud Trends from Last Year

I had occasion to go through Javelin’s anticipated fraud trends written by the prolific Al Pascual. My intention is to do a quick search on the items mentioned there. As I’ve indicated in the past, I find a lot of material from places like Javelin and Aite to be…’light’ or ‘skimpy’. They feel like meant to provide bullet points but not with serious or deep thought to buttress them. This one is similar, but I don’t feel like it is trying to portray itself as something it’s not. As a result, it was not a bad read. Oh, the reference – ‘2019 Fraud Trends’ .

In short, Javelin notes three areas they expect to be active with regards to fraud and fraud related tools: 1) increased speed in payments systems; 2) impact of the changing regulatory environment; 3) evolution of the authentication environment. Specifically, the point about payments systems is the increase in things like Peer-2-Peer technology, I think that means things like Apple Wallet or Venmo ,will prove to be increasingly targeted, especially as smaller banks start to use them without the kinds of defenses the big boys have. With the regulatory environment, Javelin provided an interesting discussion of the impact of both the European new GDPR and the new California privacy legislation. Those will likely be the cutting edge of a general trend. I think about it in the context of the block chain use case I’ve read about for consumers to own and essentially sign for their identities. Finally, Javelin sees authentication to continue going into the biometric direction but more in regards to visual imagery of individuals, driven by really good evolution in the ease and efficiency of that technology. They suggest that OTP is already ‘outmoded’.

A quick google check, showed that under P2P fraud shows others are anticipating growth of fraud there, especially around account takeover.There’s an article from a group with a site ‘SecurityIntelligence.com’ who talk about it and how to detect the signs of it (essentially unexpected movement of large amounts of $). I could not tell from a quick search whether actual incidence of this is increasing.