By John Leyden for The Register
This article has been reproduced from The Register, with
permission.
Direct debits and most other payments will not be affected by
the extra checks, Barclays spokesman John Warren told the BBC's
Money Box programme. "We are introducing a day's delay to payments
made by Barclay's customers to other Barclays bank holders which
are made for the first time. It just allows our systems and
procedures to check and validate their payments... and spot
payments that are unusual," he said.
Scam emails that form the basis of phishing attacks commonly
pose as 'security check' emails from well-known businesses. These
messages attempt to trick users into handing over their account
details and passwords to bogus sites. Typically, the fraudsters
behind the 'phishing' scams are located outside the UK. Since they
are unable to transfer money directly from a victims' online
account overseas, UK intermediaries - or 'mules' - are hired to
transfer money into other UK bank accounts before sending it
overseas. The extra security checks are designed to thwart this
stage of the scam.
Although UK bank's losses from phishing attacks are still
relatively low the volume of attacks has increased, prompting banks
to take action. Banks, under pressure to speed up electronic
payments, introduced plans to introduce a new infrastructure by
2007 on Monday. Consumers groups said extra security checks to
prevent phishing must not be allowed to derail this process.
Laurence Baxter, Senior Policy Advisor at consumers' association
Which? said: "They could do more on security if they need to. But
they cannot use this as an excuse to sit on people's money for days
on end. We would like to see payments sped up to same day or
overnight and we would like to see the banks ensuring that there
are proper security measures to do that," he said.
© The Register
2005
