Reported by Daniel de Visé

If you feel that no bank account is entirely safe from scams and fraud these days, you aren’t being paranoid. 

Three in 10 bank customers experienced fraudulent activity on their accounts in the past year, according to a first bank fraud study by J.D. Power, the consumer analytics firm. 

Some consumers sent money to scam artists with a payment app. Others found unauthorized purchases on their statements or had money stolen from their accounts. 

Analysts at J.D. Power said fraud is proliferating in an era of peer-to-peer (P2P) payment apps and increasingly impersonal transactions.  

“You would never, as a consumer, take $100 and hand it to a stranger. But in many ways, that’s how P2P works,” said Jennifer White, senior director of banking and payment intelligence at J.D. Power. 

Data leaks, such as the massive National Public Data breach, give scammers access to billions of Social Security numbers and other consumer data. A bad actor can telephone a customer, masquerading as a bank and armed with enough knowledge to sound convincing. 

“It’s easy to fall for this because they have a lot of your personal information,” said Paul Benda, executive vice president for risk, fraud and cybersecurity at the American Bankers Association. 

‘It’s not just happening once’

The study, released on Nov. 7, found that 29% of bank customers experienced fraud in the last 12 months. Of that group, 45% had multiple incidents of fraud. 

“It’s not just happening once,” White said. 

Customers under age 40 were even more likely to fall victim to bank fraud.  

That might seem counterintuitive, White said, given that younger Americans are digital natives. But they are also more likely to use payment apps, she said, making them potentially more vulnerable. 

Read full report; https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2024/11/16/bank-fraud-data-breach-security-tips/76306749007/