The Australian Payments Clearing Association (APCA) releases card fraud statistics every six months for the preceding 12m period. Lockstep monitors these figures and plots the trend data. We got a bit too busy in 2014 and missed the last couple of APCA releases, so this blog is a catch up, summarising and analysing stats from calendar year 2013 and AU financial year 2014 (July 2013 to June 2014).
In the 12 months to June 2014,
- Total card fraud rose by 22% to A$321 million
- Card Not Present (CNP) fraud rose 27% to A$256 million
- CNP fraud now represents 80% of all card fraud.
APCA is one of the major payments systems regulators in Australia. It has only ever had two consistent things to say about Card Not Present fraud. First, it reassures the public that CNP fraud is only rising because online shopping is rising, implying that it's really not a big deal. Second, APCA produces advice for shoppers and merchants to help them stay safe online.
I suppose that in the 1950s and 60s, when the road toll started rising dranatically and car makers we called on to improve safety, the auto industry might have played down that situation like APCA does with CNP fraud. "Of course the road toll is high" they might have said; "it's because so many people love driving!". Fraud is not a necessary part of online shopping; at some point payments regulators will have to tell us, as a matter of policy, what level of fraud they think is actually reasonable, and start to press the industry to take action. In absolute terms, CNP fraud has ballooned by a factor of 10 in the past eight years. The way it's going, annual online fraud might overtake the cost of car theft (currently $680 million) before 2020.
As for APCA's advice for shoppers to stay safe online, most of it is nearly useless. In their Christmas 2014 media release (PDF), APCA suggested:
Consumers can take simple steps to help stay safe when shopping online including:
- Only providing their card details on secure websites - looking for the locked padlock.
- Always keeping their PC security software up-to-date and doing a full scan often.
The truth is very few payment card details are stolen from websites or people's computers. Organised crime targets the databases of payment processors and big merchants, where they steal the details of tens of millions of cardholders at once. Four of the biggest ever known credit card breaches occurred in the last 18 months (Ref: DataLossDB):
- 109,000,000 credit cards - Home Depot, September 2014
- 110,000,000 credit cards - Target, December 2013
- 145,000,000 credit cards - eBay, May 2014
- 152,000,000 credit cards - Adobe, Oct 2013.
In its latest Data Breach Investigations Report, Verizon states that "2013 may be remembered as ... a year of transition to large-scale attacks on payment card systems".
Verizon has plotted the trends in data breaches at different sources; it's very clear that servers (where the datsa is held) have always been the main target of cybercriminals, and are getting proportionally more attention year on year. Diagrag at right from Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report 2014.
So APCA's advice to look for website padlocks and keep anti-virus up-to-date - as important as that may be - won't do much at all to curb payment card theft or fraud. You might never have shopped online in your life, and still have your card details stolen, behind your back, at a department store breach.
Over the course of a dozen or more card fraud reports, APCA has had an on-again-off-again opinion of the credit card scheme's flagship CNP security measure, 3D Secure. In FY2011 (after CNP fraud went up 46%), APCA said "retailers should be looking at a 3D Secure solution for their online checkout". Then in their FY2012 media release, as losses kept increasing, they made no mention of 3D Secure at all.
Calendar year 2012 saw Australian CNP fraud fall for the first time ever, and APCA was back on the 3D Secure bandwagon, reporting that "The drop in CNP fraud can largely be attributed to an increase in the use of authentication tools such as MasterCard SecureCode and Verified by Visa, as well as dedicated fraud prevention tools."
Sadly, it seems 2012 was a blip. Online fraud for FY2014 (PDF) has returned to the long term trend. It's impossible to say what impact 3D Secure has really had in Australia, but penetration and consumer awareness of this technology remains low. It was surprising that APCA previously rushed to attribute a short-term drop in fraud to 3D Secure; that now seems overly optimistic, with CNP frauds continuing to mount after all.
In my view, it beggars belief the payments industry has yet to treat CNP fraud as seriously as it did skimming and carding. Technologically, CNP fraud is not a hard problem. It's just the digital equivalent of analogue skimming and carding, and it could be stopped just as effectively by using chips to protect cardholder data, just as they do in Card Present payments, whether by EMV card or NFC mobile devices.
In 2012, I published a short paper on this: Calling for a Uniform Approach to Card Fraud Offline and On (PDF).
Abstract
The credit card payments system is a paragon of standardisation. No other industry has such a strong history of driving and adopting uniform technologies, infrastructure and business processes. No matter where you keep a bank account, you can use a globally branded credit card to go shopping in almost every corner of the world. The universal Four Party settlement model, and a long-standing card standard that works the same with ATMs and merchant terminals everywhere underpin seamless convenience. So with this determination to facilitate trustworthy and supremely convenient spending in every corner of the earth, it's astonishing that the industry is still yet to standardise Internet payments. We settled on the EMV standard for in-store transactions, but online we use a wide range of confusing and largely ineffective security measures. As a result, Card Not Present (CNP) fraud is growing unchecked.
This article argues that all card payments should be properly secured using standardised hardware. In particular, CNP transactions should use the very same EMV chip and cryptography as do card present payments.