Danger Ahead: Digital Banking Fraud Trends In India According to a recent report, account takeover represents more than half of all fraud cases for its customers in India.

According to a trecent report, account takeover represents more than half of all fraud cases for its customers in India. The findings come on the heels of a recommendation by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) that financial institutions in that country abandon text-based one-time-passcodes as a method of secure authentication.

The report offers an in-depth look at the latest fraud risks and prevention strategies for banks in the country as they rapidly employ digital transformation strategies, which analyzed more than 350 million sessions in the month of December alone.

Here are some of the main findings from the report:

1. Account takeover attacks still dominate: Accounting for 55% of all fraud in India, third-party account takeover fraud still represents a bigger slice of the fraud pie than the social engineering scams BioCatch sees exploding elsewhere on the planet.

2. Mules a massively underreported plague: Every device found to participate in mule activity in India logged into an average of 35 accounts each.

3. Fraudsters likely accessing Indian mule accounts from outside the country: While 86% of the first session of documented mule account activity came from within India, after a month that number fell to just 20% – and 16% of those sessions used a VPN.

4. BioCatch customers saw more mule activity (14% of the total) in Bhubaneswar than anywhere else in the country.

5. Lucknow and Navi Mumbai accounted for 3.4% of recorded mule activity, two cities in West Bengal – Bhagabatipur and Gobindapur – 1.7% and 2.6% respectively, Mumbai 2.2%, Bengaluru 1.8%, and Cuttack 1.6%.

The report underscores the urgency with which Indian banks must bolster their fraud defenses. Financial institutions in the region that are successfully detecting and preventing an ever-evolving array of threats have adopted integrated advanced solutions.

The report was by BioCatch, which deals in digital fraud detection powered by behavioral biometric intelligence