A new study of small to mid-sized businesses shows that 75% of banking fraud is now taking place online according to a report from InformationWeek.
The 2011 Business Banking Trust Study, commissioned by Guardian Analytics and conducted by the Ponemon Institute, found that 56% of the companies in the study reported some sort of banking fraud in that last year. Of those companies, 75% reported that the banking fraud they experienced took place over the internet, and 61% of them claim to have been targeted on more than one occasion.
The 533 respondents in the study, mostly owners or senior executives with corporate bank account access, came from businesses averaging annual incomes of $21.6 million and fewer than 200 employees.
Guardian Analytics CEO, Terry Austin, says the new figures are almost identical to those found by the same study in the previous year.
Among the findings: organizations are having difficulty spotting banking fraud. Fully 78% of the scams weren’t discovered until after the funds had been transferred to parties not related to the company. Only 8% of victims claimed to have been fully compensated by their respective banks for their fraud-related losses, with 29% claiming to have received partial compensation, and a further 31% claiming to have received no compensation whatsoever.
The incidence of fraud related to smartphones and tablets also jumped: 38% of respondents said critical and sensitive financial data was accessed via tablets and smartphones, compared with 23% in the 2010 study.
“The banks have not stepped up and adopted the techniques and the
technology that is available to them in a broad enough fashion to make
any material difference,” Austin told ComputerWorld regarding what these
statistics meant and who is at fault.
According to the report, bank size had no bearing on the prevalence of fraud.
