Payment card fraud in Poland at record high levels

A recent National Bank of Poland (NBP) analysis of Polish payment card systems revealed that the record 30,000 instances of payment card fraud were reported in the period from July to December 2013, a tendency that experts contribute to various factors, the Polish media reported in April 2014.

“The number of thefts is increasing because the overall number of payment cards and the number of payment card transactions have increased,” Piotr Romanowski, Bank Millennium expert, said as quoted by Polish daily Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.

Maciej Mielczarek, an expert at mBank, attributes the negative tendency to an increased cybercrime activity.

“By applying various social engineering methods via internet, cyber criminals obtain credit card data,” Mielczarek explained. “The data is then used for theft via internet or via POS terminals.”

Other experts claim that fraud statistics may be influenced by the increasingly popular proximity cards, which do not require PIN code authorization to complete a transaction. Typically, a fraudster steals a proximity card and uses it to pay for low value goods. The decreasing average value of fraud payment card transactions seems to corroborate this hypothesis.

According to the NBP analysis, the number of payment card fraud instances in the second half of 2013 increased by 6.7% compared to the first half of 2013, a historic record high.

The analysis showed that fraudsters committed payment card fraud via internet most often (34.4 percent). This was followed closely by fraud committed using forged cards (31.6 percent). The third most popular type of fraud were transactions with stolen cards (23.4 percent). The total value of the transactions using defrauded payment cards amounted to PLN 12.9 mln, a symbolic 1.8 percent increase compared to 1H 2013.

Photo courtesy of Europol