Banking fraud and financial crime trends in Germany
A recent report from BioCatch found that Germans are less likely to receive scam refunds than other countries in the EU. Germany suffers less from the purchase scams tormenting the rest of the continent and more from typical impersonation and investment scams. That is according to new findings published by BioCatch.
Most often, these attacks come from native German-speakers residing in Eastern Europe, both making these scams appear more legitimate to German victims and contrasting with the English-speaking world, where most attacks originate in Asia.
BioCatch Director of Global Fraud Intelligence Tom Peacock said: “If there’s good news for German banking customers, it’s that Germany has some of the best financial regulation in the world. We’ve seen the Federal Financial Supervisory Authority (BaFin) take the lead in identifying and then issuing regular alerts about prevalent investment scams in the country. German prosecutors have also proved effective in breaking up criminal phishing networks.”
While Germans may lag a bit behind other European nations in their adoption of online banking and mobile-payment systems, this is rapidly changing. BioCatch’s firstever Germany fraud trends report shows annual growth in mobile-payment adoption rose by nearly 44 percent last year (more than double what it was in the UK), bringing with it equal amounts of convenience and new risk of fraud and financial crime.
Other key Germany Report findings found that Germans are less likely to receive scam refunds than other countries in the EU. Legislation in Germany requires banks only reimburse victims of unauthorised fraud. Even in those cases, the victim must still prove they weren’t negligent, delaying the refund process and leading to low refund-rates compared to the rest of Europe.
Germany’s response to anti-money-laundering (AML) failings in recent years has led to a reduction in risk-tolerance among financial institutions in the country, adding friction and headaches to the digital banking experience.