According to data from the National Bank, in the fourth quarter of 2023 alone, fraudsters managed to siphon off 8.1 billion forints from customers' accounts, with the number of documented cases reaching nearly 48,000, as reported by CIB Bank. Additionally, there were attempts to steal another 4.8 billion forints that were unsuccessful.

Parallel to the rise in electronic payment traffic over the past years, the value associated with abuses of electronic financial operations has also been on the increase.

Data from the Hungarian National Bank indicates that for the fourth quarter of 2023, damages in non-card electronic payment traffic, which includes transfers and direct debits, nearly amounted to 5.8 billion forints. Meanwhile, more than 2.3 billion forints of damage was recorded for card-based transactions.

The number of card-related abuses exceeded 44,200 in just one quarter, while the National Bank registered more than 3,700 successful fraud cases within electronic money traffic, highlighted in a statement from CIB Bank. In addition, there were almost 14,000 attempted frauds valued at 4.8 billion forints.

However, there is good news as the number and value of successful fraud attempts significantly decreased in the fourth quarter compared to the previous three months. Bank statistics also reveal that the majority of abuses were based on the acquisition of customers' data, meaning that the fraudsters accessed the victims' money using stolen identifiers.

"With the development of technology and the rapid growth of digital money flow, criminals also use increasingly sophisticated methods to commit fraud. Hence, it's crucially important to never allow anyone access to our banking identifiers," stated Gábor Bártfai, Head of Information Security at CIB Bank.

The Golden Rules of Safe Banking by CIB Bank

In the statement, CIB Bank shared the rules for safe banking:

- Financial service providers never request certain data during phone or email inquiries for using their services, including passwords required for transactions, login IDs, or recovery codes. Therefore, under no circumstance should we fulfill such requests.

- Always carefully check the platform (e.g., website), whom, and how much we are transferring or paying during electronic purchasing transactions.

- Never allow others to access the electronic devices we use for banking operations and refrain from installing applications or remote access programs on our computers or mobile phones.

- Delete suspicious emails without opening attachments and hang up on calls indicating phishing attempts. Immediately contact our bank and file a police report if we suspect a successful fraudulent attempt.

The fraudsters often impersonate a bank representative over the phone occasionally faking a transfer if they incorrectly mention the bank's name and try to obtain identification data by referring to suspicious account activities.

Another common method involves, under the guise of addressing questionable account movements, persuading panicked customers to install screen-sharing software, thus easily gaining access to account identification data.

Significant damages are also caused by psychological influence tactics, where scammers posing as representatives of charitable organizations or foundations supporting noble causes, or even pretending to be relatives or friends in distress, attempt to gain access to the victim's account.

The statement emphasized that customers themselves could do the most for prevention: by adhering to a few simple rules, these fraud attempts can be effectively filtered out.