Banks start tracking customers’ keyboard behaviour in effort to defeat criminals

HIGH street banks have begun monitoring “biometric behaviour” to catch fraudsters, including checking how customers type on their keyboard or even hold their mobile phone.

Fraud experts are tracking how users type and swipe on their smartphones in a bid to crack down on account manipulation, while banks are currently building tens of millions of user profiles to catch “digital fingerprints” and block cyber criminals.

The Royal Bank of Scotland has been using the technology from Israeli firm Biocatch. The tools have been used at its private bank Coutts and have been tested at Natwest and Ulster Bank.

The bank is considering launching the so-called “behavioural biometric” tools for millions more of its customers. RBS said the Biocatch tools can flag up unusual behaviour on customer accounts to its fraud team, who then call the customer to ask about transactions.

When customers log on to their RBS accounts, the bank’s fraud detection software begins recording 2,000 different interactive gestures.

“It can be anything from the pressure they use to type with or the way they move the mouse,” Kevin Hanley, RBS’S innovation director, told The Daily Telegraph. “We can then see how it deviates. We have managed to stop six or seven figure sums going out by spotting these patterns.”

In one case, the bank detected a hacker attempting to log in to a user’s account using the numbers at the top of the keyboard, rather than the number pad. The software detected the anomaly and shut down the transaction.

The technology is used in conjunction with human reviewers.

Hundreds of millions of passwords and email addresses have been leaked online in cyber attacks, giving hackers a chance to try to find out financial details from internet users.

However, some privacy advocates have voiced concerns about the levels of data collection. Under European data laws, companies can use an exemption on data collection for fraud and security.