E-Money: Payment Complexity in Europe & Cybercrime in the US

Monday, October 28th, 2019

Cyberattacks spread across borders and evolve with rapid advances in the modern world of the Internet and high technologies. E-money can move quite easily, thus being conveniently used for legitimate and illegitimate purposes. Today, cyber is entering a new phase where criminals are focused on advertising their services on the dark web. Let’s move forward to discover more about the topic.

Payment Complexity: E-Money

Electronic-money is a broad term used to describe money that can digitally be stored on a technical device or a banking system. It makes electronic transactions much simpler and easier. As for the difference between electronic money and cryptocurrency, the former is backed by the given country’s legal tender and can be exchanged for physical cash.

Some electronic money institutions are connected with only 1-2 agents. Others are tied to 10 or even more agents. When passing through one of these agents, transactions add an additional layer between the sender and receiver to make it harder for parties to reveal the payment source and the destination it’s going to.

Sometimes, these agents are spread around the European Economic Area (EEA). Thus, regulators and potential-task forces get faced with the more challenging investigation and enforcement processes. As for the US, the latter doesn’t have an open approach to this type of transactions.

Let’s look at some stats concerning fraud in the UK. So, according to Fraud Barometer as of August 2019 (in the UK regions):

• Scotland is seeing a reduced number of high-value fraud cases
• The fraud value in Yorkshire and the North East has fallen by 2/3
• The fraud value in North West has dropped by over 50%
• The value of Midlands fraud has reached over £81.6 million
• The value of fraud cases in South West has reduced
• In Wales, there’re fewer higher-value cases of fraud
• £82 million fraud in South East is organized by professional fraudsters

What are you doing to protect the electronic-money transfers associated with your own business? Are you using reliable fraud prevention techniques? If not, just turn to a reputable merchant-services comparison company in the UK like Best Payment Providers to find unmatched fraud- prevention solutions for e-money processing.

Cybercrime Goes On Maturing

Cybercrime has no intention to stop its further growth. It’s getting bolder and more focused on larger and more lucrative targets and newer technologies. Since fraudsters are choosing data as a target for their crimes, companies need to invest more in improving their security measures and boosting consumer awareness.

Cybercriminals are involved in various cybercrimes. These include:

• Fraud
• Hacking
• Malware creation and distribution
• DDoS attacks
• Blackmail
• Intellectual-property crime such as counterfeit- or falsified-trademarked product sales

And more.

Attackers are now working on developing more advanced capabilities to attack core-banking systems, specifically, those related to payment messaging and transaction authorization. Moreover, they’re working more aggressively on disabling their victims from responding.

To sum up, the current cyber threat to financial systems is on the rise. Attackers continue to come up with new ways to collaborate with organised criminal gangs across borders.