Within minutes of entering her card details, she got a call from her bank telling her fraudulent transactions were being made. The next day Robert Clayton from Britain's Financial Conduct Authority called to say they were pursuing the criminals responsible but that her savings were at risk.
The country is the global epicentre for such attacks, according to five of the biggest British banks and more than a dozen security experts who said scammers were buying up batches of consumers' personal details on the dark net to target the record numbers shopping and banking online since the pandemic.
"The most sophisticated fraud tends to start in the UK, and then move two years later to the U.S. and then around the world," said Ayelet Biger-Levin, vice president of product strategy at U.S.-based cybersecurity firm BioCatch, which provides anti-fraud technology to banks. After filling out a form on the website and receiving a call from a staff member there, she called them back on the number listed on the website to check the phone number was legitimate, made further checks about the bond and went on to invest.
Barclays, her bank, has refunded only half the money, saying she could have done more to protect herself. "The faster payment system has facilitated faster fraud," said Richard Emery, a fraud expert who is advising Anna and 63 other scam victims whose average loss is 102,000 pounds. The country ranks second in the world behind the United States as a source of automated bot attacks, the fastest-growing type of fraud attack in the world, according to data from LexisNexis Risk Solutions, a financial crime analysis firm.
"The UK is the hotbed of activity for fraudsters. Currently the UK accounts for about 80% of our global personal fraud losses," it said.
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