Irish consumers fall prey to payment scams at a relatively lower rate than their European Union counterparts, according to the Central Bank of Ireland, and despite a recent rise in the value of fraudulent payments, incidents of fraud remain fairly low in the Republic.
Fraud rates are lower here than the European Union (EU) average across most payment methods, including credit transfers, e-money payments and direct debits, the financial regulator said in a post on its website on Friday.
However, the rate of fraud involving card payments was slightly higher in the Republic than the EU average, according to the analysis, accounting for 0.034 per cent and 0.036 per cent of the total value of transactions in 2022 and 2023, compared with EU averages of 0.026 per cent and 0.031 per cent in those years.
Carried out by Sangamithra Varadarajan, a statistical data analyst at the Central Bank, the research found that payment fraud disproportionately relates to cross-border payments, reflecting similar trends across the EU.
Around 60 per cent of the total value of fraud across 2022-2023 involved cross-border payments, Ms Varadarajan found, amounting to €77 million in 2023 and €64 million in 2022. Overalll, online card payments had a fraud rate of 0.06 per cent in 2023, Ms Varadarajan said, six times higher than the 0.01 per cent for physical payments.
Meanwhile, the majority – some 84 per cent – of card payment fraud incidents related to online transactions in 2023, amounting to €37.4 million.
Card detail theft was the most prevalent method of fraud, accounting for two-thirds of the value of fraudulent card payments in 2023. It often involves the cloning of card details by criminals using devices installed on ATMs or criminals accessing the information by hacking public wifi.
The volume of suspected fraud offences reported by financial institutions, including services such as Revolut, has been so large over the last 18 months that tens of thousands of reports have yet to be processed, The Irish Times reported earlier this month.
The Central Statistics Office (CSO) has indefinitely paused the publication of any further quarterly or annual national crime trends until the true extent of fraud in the Republic is better understood and more accurately captured.
Sources said the number of unprocessed reports of suspected fraud is likely between 20,000 and 30,000, even though the new mechanism for collecting the reports was only put in place in August 2023.
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