First, let’s look at the key areas that are going to be impacting on financial institutions, consumers and the fraudsters in 2023 before moving onto some predictions.

There is now positive momentum for consumers as regulators and governments seek to stem the financial harm of scams, by increasing the level of refunds. The UK is leading the way here, but we are starting to see positive steps in the US and EU. 

Sticking with regulation, there will be more coming to the DeFi world, whether crypto, Web3 or the Metaverse. This will require exchanges and custodians to step up their fraud and financial crime systems and processes, bringing more alignment to fiat.

As regulation increases, we’ll see the traditional financial institutions (FI’s) move into this world in a bigger way, even as they block payments for retail customers to the existing crypto exchanges.

Real-time or instant payments take a further acceleration globally. FedNow joins RTP in the US (along with Zelle and Venmo), RTR (Canada) might just go live at the end of 2023. In the Middle East, the IPP (UAE) and IPS (KSA) will both ramp up. The EU mandating Instant Payments on PSPs will provide a big rise in real time in a large market. 

Add to this the continuing rollout of SWIFT GPI and SWIFT GO along with pilots between RTP & the EBA, near real-time for cross-border payments is also here.

All of these efforts make it easier for both consumers, businesses and fraudsters to move funds quickly. This makes it much harder for FIs to identify frauds without interrupting genuine payments. They also increase the worth of mule accounts that can receive payments in real-time.

On the positive side we should see passwords start to be replaced in earnest with passkeys and increasing use (at least for businesses) of FIDO Hardware keys to help prevent password data compromises and phishing.

And then there is the likely the biggest impact of fraud next year, global recession. Certainly, the UK (likely already in negative growth), US and Europe will be in recession. This will have a number of negative impacts on the fraud environment such as; increased job scams, more APP scams targeting the poor and vulnerable with fake offers of help with bills or government schemes, increased insider fraud risks as firms lay off people among others.

At CYBERA we’re on a mission to stop money laundering and help protect customers from scams and other financial cybercrime. We close gaps that allow cyber criminals to thrive by sharing crime data in real-time with financial institutions, fintech, and crypto exchanges, and coordinating a global response to support customers who have become victims of financial cybercrime.

CYBERCRIME WATCHLIST_^TM helps support firms to reduce fraud and money laundering and meet the requirements of the CRM as part of a holistic fraud and financial crime strategy.

Financial Institutions (FIs) can check against the CYBERCRIME WATCHLIST^TM for confirmed mule accounts when processing payments. For outbound & inbound payments, where there is a match on either IBAN (Account Number & Sort code) or on Name the transaction can be flagged as high risk.

At account opening and ongoing CDD, email, phone and name can be used to match to CYBERCRIME WATCHLIST^TM to reduce opening new mule accounts.

CYBERCRIME COMPLAINT^TM further supports by providing users with alerts of any of their accounts reported as mules directly in their dashboard.

Unlike other data sources, CYBERA is a global solution, so is well placed to support the increasing levels of cross-border real-time payments.