Financial Services: Fraud

(asked on 10th June 2019) - View Source

Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps he is taking to reduce fraud in the financial sector.


Answered by
Ben Wallace Portrait
Ben Wallace
This question was answered on 18th June 2019

Fraud poses a major threat to the UK, with over 3.6 million estimated inci-dents of fraud in 2018. The Government is committed to tackling this crime, but no single body can do this alone. This work demands a truly collaborative approach within both the public and private sector.

The Joint Fraud Taskforce (JFT) was established in 2016 as a coalition of government, regulators, law enforcement and the private sector to tackle fraud collaboratively. It has delivered initiatives like the Banking Protocol, which is a rapid response scheme between high-street banks and the police to identify frauds in action. This initiative has prevented over £48m from falling into fraudsters’ hands, leading to over 400 arrests.

Further action is being taken by regulators and industry to increase payments security and reduce fraud. From 14 September of this year, supplementary rules to the second Payment Services Directive - the Strong Customer Au-thentication regulatory technical standards – will apply. Payment service providers (e.g. banks) will be required to apply multi-factor authentication to higher-value and higher-risk electronic transactions, which should reduce incidents of fraud.

The payments industry is undertaking further work to help prevent Authorised Push Payment (APP) scams from occurring. The Confirmation of Payee (CoP) initiative is the industry agreed way of ensuring that names of recipients are checked before payments are sent and received. Industry are developing the service so that CoP can be implemented by payment providers during 2019.

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