Australian Bank Spots Scams via How Users Hold Their Phones

Can the angle at which you hold your phone help your bank protect against scams?

National Australia Bank seems to think so.

Speaking during the Australian Banking Association Conference in Melbourne Wednesday (June 26), CEO Andrew Irvine said the lender introduced more “friction” to payments processes and new predictive protection tools to spot scammers, Bloomberg reported.

“We’ve added tooling that looks at biometrics and the way you actually interact with your devices and how you think about keystrokes,” said Irvine, per the report. “If these things are different to how you’ve used your phone in the past, our intelligence will kick in.”

Irvine, who called fraudsters the “scourge of our times,” also noted that Australia is one of the few countries where bank fraud has declined, the report said.

Still, he said that as scammers have embraced new technology like artificial intelligence, banks have had to shift from making payments fast and simple to adding more steps to protect against fraudulent transactions, per the report.

“These threat actors go where the money is,” Irvine said, according to the report. “You want to be the best alarm system in the street and right now Australia’s leading the way.”

PYMNTS explored the rising threat of scams last month in a conversation with Chris Reid, executive vice president of identity solutions at Mastercard.

“The reality is scammers are embracing really sophisticated technologies, like AI, to deceive their victims — and scams these days are incredibly convincing,” Reid told PYMNTS.

The tactics bad actors use to get at human-level vulnerabilities have moved from easy-to-spot attempts into sophisticated operations.

“The impact of scam crimes is much more severe than traditional payment fraud,” Reid said. “It leaves the victim with a reduced self-worth and confidence and lowers their faith in society.”

It’s why, amid the rising threat of industrialized scam tactics, equally innovative solutions are emerging to take on fraud. For example, Mastercard in April debuted Scam Protect, a suite of specialized scam identification and prevention solutions combining identity, biometric AI and open banking capabilities.