Practical Fraud Prevention

Part III. Consumer Banking Fraud Analytics

This part of the book concentrates on fraud as it relates to banking and financial institutions.

The fact that we’re shifting our focus from ecommerce to banking is not to say that this section is irrelevant to fraud fighters working in ecommerce businesses or online marketplaces. Many of the fraud techniques that receive attention in the banking industry are also used against ecommerce sites.

As we have said before in this book, fraudsters don’t confine themselves to categories. A fraud prevention professional might spend their entire career in banking, but a fraudster will look for opportunities everywhere and exploit whatever vulnerabilities they can find. Fraudsters might specialize in one area or industry, but they rarely confine their activities to it. Doing so would limit their ability to monetize theft: stolen data that failed to be useful in attacking a bank might be put to work to attack an online marketplace; conversely, the wrong kind of data for attacking an ecommerce site could be the right kind of data to begin applying for credit and building up a credit profile for a fake identity. And so on.

This part of the book includes a chapter on opening fraudulent online accounts and a chapter on account takeover (ATO). And while we give extra attention to the banking use case in terms of language and examples, much of the material is just as relevant to ecommerce sites, which also suffer from these forms of fraud. In the same ...