Internet Banking Fraud is a scam or theft committed using online technology to illegally take money from a bank account and transfer money to an account in a different bank owned and operated by the hacker. Internet Banking Fraud is a form of identity theft and is usually made possible through techniques such as phishing.
Even with the convenience and simplicity Internet Banking offers, many customers avoid online banking as they perceive it as being too vulnerable to fraud. The security measures employed by most banks are never 100% safe, but in practice the number of fraud victims due to online banking is very small. Indeed, conventional banking practices may be more prone to abuse by fraudsters than online banking. Credit card fraud, signature forgery and identity theft are far more widespread “offline” crimes than malevolent hacking. Bank transactions are generally traceable and criminal penalties for bank fraud are high. Online banking can be more insecure if users are careless, gullible or computer illiterate. An increasingly popular criminal practice to gain access to a user’s finances is phising, whereby the user is in some way persuaded to hand over their password to a fraudster.