Is fraud on the current account at the same levels or lower/ higher levels than the pre paid having 600,000 + more customers since your last update.
So I’m going to break this down into different categories, I’ll naturally have to keep things quite high level but can share some info. I’d love to do another blog post with updated numbers but not sure when this will be.
Top up fraud (someone signs up for Monzo and then tops up with stolen debit card details)
This basically disappeared when we stopped acquiring new customers during migration and then flared back up when we opened the flood gates to new customers again. We implemented a brand new fraud engine to combat it that could process more data in real time and since then it’s back down to very low levels. I don’t have the numbers to hand but I think our rate is probably a bit lower than where it ended on that graph.
Money Muling
Very large increase in this compared with prepaid. The most common example is where a criminal organisation has convinced people to sign up to Monzo and then help them launder money in exchange for cash. This is really upsetting as the individual involved is often not the criminal mastermind and they are throwing their life away over a few hundred pounds. The fraudulent funds often come from customers at other banks that have been tricked into sending the payment / giving over their passwords. Sometimes people are being conned out of their life savings and its genuinely very upsetting to see.
This is where we’ve probably spent the most time – we’ve been working really hard to help detect this. It’s a challenge to trade off:
- Potentially withholding funds from a genuine customer whilst waiting to confirm the funds are genuine
- Being able to stop someone’s stolen life savings from leaving the account
I don’t have the figures to hand but we are preventing something like 70% of this fraud now and it’s so gratifying to be able to return the funds to the victim.
We have some genuine customers that feel let down because we withheld access to funds whilst verifying with the other bank. We also have customers of other banks that are angry that we couldn’t prevent the stolen funds from leaving the recipient account.
It’s genuinely a challenge to trade off these two things – someone who was been defrauded always thinks we should hold more funds and someone who has had their funds held thinks we shouldn’t.
Other Financial Crime
Seeing quite a bit more of this than prepaid – the addition of outbound FPS makes it more attractive to some people. We are very good at detecting it though and report money laundering to the NCA via a suspicious activity report.