Fraudsters are already taking HUF 100 million from the bank accounts of Hungarians every day, and so far there is no serious sign that people are learning from the horrific news.

The central protection system can be installed in a year and a half at the earliest.

In two years, the amount of damage caused in electronic money circulation has increased tenfold. The latest 2023. III. according to quarterly data

the amount of money embezzled in bank card transactions and through transfers exceeded HUF 11.4 billion during the three months. Two years earlier, 2021 III. In the fourth quarter, the value of the abuses remained below HUF 1.18 billion

Accounts are stripped

The increase in both bank card and bank transfer traffic is significant: in the summer months of this year, the MNB measured an 81 percent increase in bank card losses on an annual level, but even this otherwise drastic growth rate is dwarfed by the increase in losses in bank transfer traffic, where more the damage value jumped threefold.

According to statistics, 80 percent of the damage is due to fraudsters attacking our bank accounts, III. the amount of invoiced damages recorded during the quarter was HUF 9.15 billion. In comparison, the 2.28 billion HUF damage value of bank card damages is considered "small change".

The majority of abuses are still abuse of bank cards, but the number of incidents fell by 14 percent to 42.7 thousand compared to the nearly fifty thousand in the first quarter of this year. At the same time, the number of wire transfer frauds continues to increase: a year ago, this number barely exceeded a thousand in the summer months; this year, between July and September, nearly 5,670 abuses were committed against account holders. All this in such a way that, according to the MNB's data, banks catch 65 percent of wire transfer abuses.

At the same time, in successful abuses, unaccounted money migrates to criminal organizations that are increasingly functioning as international corporations. In the case of bank card fraud, the average amount per misuse has jumped by almost a quarter compared to the second quarter, and now exceeds HUF 53,000, but this value seems ridiculously low compared to the fact that more than HUF 1.6 million are already stolen in a single misuse this year. fraudsters on average from our bank accounts. Thanks to the above, in the case of damage to cash flows during transfers

HUF 100 million migrates from our accounts to fraudsters every day.

The final part is paid by the customer

The dramatic increase in wire transfer damages is only slightly embellished by the fact that, as we have already mentioned, there is more and more misuse of bank filters, as the increase is to such an extent that, looking at the absolute data, we are horrified regardless. It is also worth looking carefully at the line of data in the central bank's statistics, according to which the banks charge an ever smaller portion of the damage caused by transfers to customers who voluntarily hand over their money or data to criminals (of course, as a result of deception).

According to statistics, III. In the second quarter, the account holders had to pay only 77.5 percent of the damages, HUF 7.1 billion, while in the II. in the fourth quarter, this value was still over 91 percent. The improving statistics could also mean that people are becoming more aware and paying attention to the continuous warnings, and similar cases that happened near them make them more careful. At the same time, there is a greater chance that the damages will only be delayed due to, for example, the fact that an increasingly serious part of the affected parties are trying to prove that they did not, for example, initiate the affected transfer, because they believed the fraudsters on the phone that if they did not make the transfer your money, then it ends up in the hands of criminals. The president of the Financial Conciliation Board (PBT), Erika Kovács, recently spoke at the Cybershield conference about the fact that the

77 percent of similar cases, representing a third of all cases, had to be terminated because the facts clearly showed that the client was responsible.

In terms of damages, the proportion of damages paid by customers has risen sharply in the case of bank cards as well: in previous years, thanks to the introduction of two-factor authentication, in addition to the reduction in the value of damages, the banks charged less than 10 percent of the damages to cardholders, but in III. in the fourth quarter, almost 30 percent of the damages were already paid here by the seriously negligent customers who carelessly played into the hands of fraudsters.

There is still more than a year of protection

People need to be more responsible, but customers cannot be left alone in the fight against fraudsters. It is not difficult to draw a parallel between the drastic increase in wire transfer fraud and the fact that in Hungary, ahead of Europe, the instant payment system (AFR) was made general, after the latest extension of which, instead of the previous HUF 10 million, up to HUF 20 million can be removed from bank accounts in a second. .

According to MNB statistics, the average value of AFR transfers is around HUF 250,000, III. In the first quarter, only 5.3 percent of the 86 million transfers exceeded HUF 1 million, and the share of transfers over HUF 10 million was only 0.8 percent.

The question is whether it is worth taking such a serious risk for this traffic. Of course, as with bank cards, limits can also be set for transfers, but this was not a priority for the regulator when developing AFR. In the bank card market, 24-hour continuous abuse screening is a basic principle, but account movements are still not protected by such fraud monitoring systems, which have been built up in the bank card field over decades, in many places. At the same time, the Central Fraud Filter System implemented by the MNB in ​​Giro Zrt. will give a lot of impetus to the protection of accounts, but the setup of a system that evaluates the affected transfer based on its riskiness and sends a report about it to the customer's bank within a maximum 5-second completion time interval of the AFR

expected for the second half of 2025 at the earliest.

And this means that the main line of defense in the coming months will continue to be strengthening customer awareness. It would be good if people were open to the truth of the proverb, according to which

"he learns fortunately, who learns at the expense of others".

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