Australia: card fraud down but shoppers urged not to be complacent over Xmas

The payments industry self-regulatory body showed that in the face of a 4.2% boost in total card spending to USD 799.4 billion, overall card fraud dropped by 6.9% to USD 527.8 million. The drop continues the trend of declining card fraud rates identified in the data for 2018 released in August 2019.

Data for the 12 months to 30 June 2019 (FY19) revealed that card-not-present (CNP) fraud dropped by 5.0% on the previous FY to USD 455.5 million as the industry has adopted secure technologies such as tokenisation, EMV 3-D Secure, real time monitoring, and machine learning.

Australians are not liable for fraud on their cards and will be reimbursed if they take due care.

Fraud involving lost or stolen cards fell by 16.1% to USD 43.0 million in FY19 and counterfeit/skimming fraud fell by 19.2% to USD 18.6 million, the latter extending a consistent trend since chip technology was progressively rolled-out in the card system over the last decade.

The data covers the period ending immediately before 1 July 2019, when the industry’s key initiative to counter online fraud, the CNP Fraud Mitigation Framework, took effect.