Protecting Your Account Holders: 3 Holiday Scams to Plan For

Criminals ramp up their efforts to take advantage of individuals and their financial institutions during the holidays.  By knowing what to look for, you can use SimpliRisk to help you detect these scams.  In this blog post, we will explore some of the common holiday scams and provide suggestions for how to use SimpliRisk to aid you in detecting them.

Common Holiday Scams

• Phishing Attacks – Scammers send fraudulent emails or messages designed to trick recipients into revealing personal information, login credentials, and to send money from their account.
• Account Takeover Fraud – Criminals often attempt to take control of customers’ bank accounts during the holiday season after successful Phishing attacks.
• Elder Abuse – Romance Scams and Tech Support Scams target elderly individuals to perform transactions or provide accounts access directly or from screen share / screen control sessions.

SimpliRisk Guidance

Many of these scams result in Authorized Push Payment (APP) scenarios, which is very hard to prevent, but can be detected with some of the following configurations within SimpliRisk.

• Out of Pattern transactions can detect APP scenarios. Using SimpliRisk monitoring series 900 or 5400 you can detect this type of behavior.
• Elder abuse monitoring will look at multiple types of transactions to identify unusual behavior, given historical trends. Using SimpliRisk monitoring series 5200 you can detect this type of behavior.
• If there are particular names of entities, processors, or people that you see during the holidays associated with fraud, then use SimpliRisk monitoring series 6600 to help you detect any other transactions with this same information.

Conclusion

Banks and credit unions are at the front lines in the battle against holiday scams, as they often bear the responsibility of safeguarding their customers’ financial well-being. By staying vigilant and proactive, banks can significantly reduce the risk of financial losses and ensure their customers have a safe and secure holiday season. Education, advanced security measures, and effective communication with customers are key in this endeavor. Together, banks and their customers can enjoy the holiday season with peace of mind.

If you would like a consultative session to review the guidance provided in this blog, please reach out to schedule a session with our support team.