SAN FRANCISCO—There’s good and bad news in the world of fraud alerts.
The good news is that more consumers are receiving them, which means more cardholders are actively taking a role in the fraud fight and that FIs are catching more suspicious activity.
But crooks now are leveraging the alerts themselves, reports MarketWatch.
“About 44% of U.S. adults have received a fraud alert in their lives for their credit or debit card, according to a new survey from CreditCards.com. That's up from 38% who said in 2015 they had ever received a fraud alert,” noted MarketWatch. “The fact that alerts have increased could be seen as a good thing. Banks and credit card companies have increasingly caught unusual behavior, and let customers know about it.”
However, fraud alerts are seen as an annoyance when consumers receive too many alerts that are mistakenly sent for legitimate transactions.
“Some 37% of people surveyed said they were contacted about potentially fraudulent transactions, but all of their transactions were legitimate purchases,” said MarketWatch.
Worse yet, crooks have begun taking advantage of the rise in fraud alerts. They have started posing as consumers' financial institutions and credit-card companies, even finding ways to call and text them with a caller ID that appears to legitimately be from those FIs, explained MarketWatch.
“When the scammers get in contact with consumers, they claim they are with their bank or credit-card company’s fraud department, in order to ask consumers for sensitive information about their accounts,” MarketWatch said.