In 2018, losses of Ukrainian banks inflicted by illegal actions with payment cards accounted for 0.0092% of the total value of all payment card transactions (0.0077% in 2017, 0.011% in 2016).
Thus, for each million of card debit operations in 2018 illegal transactions accounted for 92 hryvnias.
At average each illegal transaction in 2018 amounted to UAH 2,500 (UAH 2,100 in 2017).
The number of fraudulent actions involving payment cards resulting in losses for banks in the previous year increased to 105,500 incidents (versus 77,600 incidents in 2017). Customarily, the majority of fraudulent transactions are committed in big cities (with the population over one million).
The biggest share of illegal actions involving payment cards in 2018 were committed online, i.e., 55,100 cases (52.2% of total incidents) that is a 1.4-fold increase over 2017.
Primarily, such negative developments are associated with rising frauds using social engineering. In 2017, fraudsters were most likely to use this method to commit illegal actions with payment cards or respective bank details. Such incidents include misrepresentation to the general public using any means to make them disclose personal information, payment card details, codes/passwords or to coerce them to transferring funds for the benefit of fraudsters.
Please note, in most cases offenders try to pose themselves as employees of a bank, or the NBU, or banks’ security agencies and actively inquire about private and other information.
Once again, the NBU underlines that representatives of banks (especially of the NBU) never call to make such inquiries and have no need or authority to request from the public information on their payment cards and accounts.
Under no circumstances should a person disclose payment card details (expiry, CVС2/CVV2, PIN), as well as private information, web-banking login and password, one-time passwords for additional authorization etc.
In order to prevent and combat fraud, the NBU recommends not to answer suspicions incoming calls and to refer to the bank that issued the payment card and to check balances on your accounts. Furthermore, it is advisable to impose limits on payment card transactions, mainly for online transactions, and to refer to SMS notification service to execute transactions.