Criminals are becoming increasingly sophisticated in the scams they deploy to steal money from vulnerable people and are using multiple channels and advanced social engineering techniques to operate with what, sometimes, seems to be impunity.
They can also move at a speed banks and regulators struggle to match, with low cost technologies such as mobile number cloning and internet telephony making entry into the criminal market virtually effortless. The cross-border and online nature of the operations, meanwhile, makes it very hard to bring perpetrators to justice.
There can be few people who have not encountered scams in recent months, with the volume of criminally-minded text messages, emails, social media posts and phone calls reaching levels that would have been unimaginable even two years ago. As a result, tens of millions of euro are lost by Irish people to scam artists each year.
Combatting this type of crime is challenging, but not impossible. Later this year, a shared fraud database should come on stream in Ireland, allowing banks to get early sight of potentially criminal activities being perpetrated by scam artists. That should improve the co-operation between banks, but other players must be involved too – notably the telecommunications operators whose services are piggy-backed on by criminals.
The most important thing, at least from a consumer perspective, is education. Banks, telcos, schools and the State must do more to alert people to the dangers and the modus operandi of scam artists. And, crucially, the manner in which money is moved needs to be urgently addressed.
Far too often criminal gangs exploit the innocence of youth and recruit students as money mules, with their bank accounts used to transfer money across the world. The message needs to be repeatedly reinforced that giving a stranger access to your bank account not only puts you at risk of criminal conviction, but also facilitates theft from vulnerable people and helps criminal networks to run their operations, with all that entails for society.