£400m card-fraud fight aided by intelligence systems

UK credit card fraud has dropped for the first time in eight years to £402.4m for 2003, largely due to the increased use of fraud intelligence systems to spot unusual spending patterns.

The annual figures from the Association of Payment Clearing Services (APACS) show a five per cent drop in fraud due to a reduction in the amount of fraud committed abroad on UK cards.

But the figures hide a rise in other areas of card fraud - identity theft grew by 45 per cent to £29.7m and fraud at UK cash machines grew by 34 per cent to £39m.

The greatest reduction was in counterfeit card fraud, which was down 28 per cent to £106.7m.

APACS said the introduction of chip and PIN, which will replace signatures with a PIN number for verifying payments at checkouts, will help tackle fraud on lost, stolen and counterfeit cards, which accounted for over half of all plastic-card fraud.

The statistics also show that cardholder-not-present fraud is now the biggest fraud type, increasing by six per cent to £116.4m last year.

Sandra Quinn, director of communications at APACS, said in a statement: "The bulk of the reduction was on transactions on counterfeit, lost or stolen cards in mainland Europe as a result of sophisticated intelligence and monitoring methods deployed by the card issuers."

She said that while the industry was attempting to tackle new fraud techniques, people should be alert for card skimming and 'bin raiding' ID theft.