Nordea: Nordics are a welcome target for online fraudsters

In the Nordic countries relatively more online fraud is committed than elsewhere in Europe. Frauds have developed rapidly.

The reasons are, among other things, the high degree of digitalization in the Nordic countries and the fact that trust is high in Nordic societies. For example, the contact of a fraudster posing as a police officer is more sensitive than in other European countries.

This is what the experts of the banking group Nordea assessed at a breakfast event organized on Tuesday in Helsinki, to which a number of professionals who follow online scams from different industries were invited.

Nordic According to the report, online scams have been attempted in the form of bank transactions this year for 45 million euros, a third of which have been successfully prevented.

“Online fraud is like a modern-day bank robbery. Another way is to call them social problems, and that’s what they really are,” said Nordea’s director of social affairs Jyrki Katainen.

Among other things, in Norway and in Sweden the obligation of banks to compensate victims of fraud has recently been increased. That is why it is important for banks to educate customers about scams.

in Finland According to Katainen, the problem for banks is that, due to personal data privacy protection and the interpretation of bank secrecy, financial institutions cannot share information about fraudsters and criminals with each other as in Sweden.

“Legislation or its interpretation should be brought on the same line.”

Member of Parliament and vice-chairman of the parliament’s finance committee invited as one of the panelists of the event Ville Kaunisto (kok) said that a couple of weeks ago, he put in a report how the exchange of information between financial institutions could be promoted, and whether it would be a question of changing the law or just its interpretation.

in Nordea more than three thousand employees prevent various types of online fraud and money laundering as their main job, said Nordea Finland’s head of personal customer business Jani Eloranta.

He called online scams “modern-day pickpocketing”.

“The problem is that there is much more money in the pocket than when walking down the street.”

At Nordea, payment traffic is monitored using artificial intelligence, so that suspicious account transfers can be intervened in time if the customer does something atypical for him.

“The challenge is international payment traffic rules. Payments have to go forward really quickly”, Nordea’s fraud prevention expert Sarah Helin told.

Nordic according to the survey, no less than 90 percent of payment scams could have been prevented if customers had stopped carefully to check what kind of contract or payment confirmation they were signing.

“Scammers appeal to haste, and they are really good at it,” warned Eloranta.

According to Helin, especially victims who have been scammed by phone calls are in a vulnerable position.

“Almost 50 percent of manipulations over the phone are successful when you get hooked.”

The Central Criminal Police criminal police constable Marko Wilderness told the event that the perpetrators of online scams have changed from domestic criminals to completely global actors.

“The Nordic trust society attracts criminals, especially in Europe.”

The creation of credible scam websites has become easier recently due to artificial intelligence, Microsoft’s technology director Juha Karppinen told.

The Finnish language on the fake site has improved, when you can ask the artificial intelligence to use chat-type software to make fluent text in Finnish.

According to Karppinen, companies in Finland have managed to protect themselves from phishing and other scams with the help of relatively well-developed email software and two-step authentication, the usage rate of which is high in Finland even in the Nordic comparison.