Skimming pays for some

The number and total value of frauds committed on debit cards was up considerably during the 2009 financial year, largely driven by a few well-publicised cases of ATM and Eftpos skimming rackets.

The total amount of money defrauded from debit card holders increased from $14.6 million in 2008 to $19.1 million, the Australian Payments Clearing Association reported yesterday in an annual review of payments fraud.

There were more than 48,000 cases of fraud on debit cards during 2008/09, up from less than 38,000 last year.

Overall, there were more than half a million cases of card fraud in the year to June 2009, the APCA said yesterday.
 
There were 481,000 individual fraudulent transactions recorded by APCA on credit and charge cards for the year, up from 413,000 last year. The rate of fraud was 0.0245 per cent of all transactions, up from 0.0220 per cent last year.
 
However, the average value of each fraudulent credit/charge card transaction was slightly down for the year, and the total value of fraud compared to the total value of all transactions was also down.

The chief executive of APCA, Chris Hamilton, says the new Eftpos company will have to address security issues concerning debit cards.

"An Eftpos transaction with a chip card is not a full chip transaction. Yes, you insert the chip card but the transaction is not processed as a full chip transaction, so the new Eftpos business will have to decide what is the development path for that to start happening."