More and more people are being targeted each day by fraudster. Only in the first half of 2016 there were more than one million cases of financial fraud, compared to 660,000 in the first half of 2015. There is no easy solution for these scams since they can vary from phishing to phone and even text scams.
Once the card details are stolen the fraudster can take advantage of this until the owner realizes of the incident and alerts the bank. However, in most cases, this is already too late as the money already left your account.
A new technology in place by one of the leading chip and PIN bank cards companies in the world, Oberthur, can solve partially this problem. The companies that are the first ones to implement this solution are two of the biggest French groups, Societe Generale and Groupe BPCE. In addition to these the cards are being tested in countries as Poland and Mexico and according to the Business Director of Oberthur Technologies UK & Ireland, Aaron Davis there is a possibility of a trial in the UK market soon.
Their new high-tech ebank cards have a security feature that will make it a lot more difficult for fraudsters to take advantage of the stolen details. The three digits on the back of the card will change, every hour, for three years so in the event that these digits have been copied they will be outdated really fast.
Although this solution does not fix the entire problem it’s an important step towards a better online security. The fraudster still has at most one hour to spend all the money on the card itself depending on when he was able to obtain all the information. In addition, this feature does not help at all in the event that the card has been stolen.
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This high-tech card is being rolled out by French banks to eliminate fraud
How is this technique better than the 3-D Secure by MasterCard and Visa? A 3-D Secure transaction will initiate a redirection to the website of the card issuing bank to authorize the transaction. Each issuer could use any kind of authentication method but typically, a password-based method is used, so to effectively buy on the Internet means using a password tied to the card. This is more secure than the solution listed above, as someone who has the physical possession of the card still cannot use it online without the password.
There are numerous vendors that do not have the 3-D Secure feature on their webshop. In addition, certain webstore are asking you for the 3-D Secure password only for the first transaction. Once your card details are being saved in their webshop all you need to do is to enter your three digit security code. The solution listed above is another layer of security which has nothing to do with 3-D Secure (it will not replace it, this feature will still be present just that your three digit code is changing). Actually using a password based method is the least secure solution available at the moment. It is easy to steal your details, considering that if your details have been compromised then most likely your 3-D Secure password is also compromised. Because of this there are 2FA (2 factor authentication) which include something that you know (e.g password, pattern) and something that you have (bank token, ebank card etc.). Simply put, this is another layer of security.