LBS Used to Cut Down on Credit Card Fraud

Mobile phone technology developed to cut down credit card fraud - SC Magazine UK

Mobile phone technology that can locate a person and determine if a credit card transaction is fraudulent has been developed by Ericsson IPX.

Following incidents where members of the IPX team had been victims of credit card fraud and had their cards blocked due to ‘unusual activity', IPX has developed the technology that can determine where a user is geographically in around two seconds.

Donya Ekstrand, head of marketing for IPX, claimed that she was called by her credit card provider and told that her card had been used in Tokyo while she was in Stockholm, and the card continued to be used for 30-35 minutes even after the activity was detected, with the criminal spending around €3,200.

Ekstrand said: “I started to think how can this happen? This is a global solution, we can reach any credit card owner in the world and we can reach about 96 per cent of the world's mobiles. It takes two seconds to check where a mobile is – it is an easy query.”

Peter Garside, IPX UK and Ireland director, claimed that the technology allows the location of which country the users' mobile phone is in, and guess the probability of where the person is.

Garside said: “Generally everyone who has a credit card has a mobile phone, so it is easy to marry the two to a bank to say that the subscriber is ‘here'. The technology in the phone is available on a raw level; it is an application that we are exploiting.”

Ekstrand further claimed that there is the potential for an SMS message to be sent to the user once a suspicious action has been made, and it would be more popular with customers as an SMS is a lot less intrusive than a call.

“We have talked to banks on how to use SMS, this is the first time it has been used globally and we need to make sure that it works with the infrastructure”, said Ekstrand.