Identity Theft in Electronic Financial Transactions The experience of the Central Bank of Spain

Abstract

Financial fraud usually goes hand in hand with the complex problem of identity theft in financial transactions. The experience gained in the Complaints Department through the presented cases and queries includes:

• Traditional falsifications in traditional financial transactions.

• The most innovative forms of digital identity theft, which covers numerous cases of credit card fraud and the increasingly worrying cases of online fraud, which are troublesome because of the impunity with which, in most cases, criminals operate on the Net and because of the high sums that can be defrauded.

• Cases of identity theft in the process of contracting financial transactions, with harmful consequences for those impersonated, as they are unjustly ordered to pay back debts and put on different defaulter’s lists, such as the CIRBE (or the ‘Risk Information Centre’ of the Central Bank of Spain).

This work aims to illustrate the main problems presented by clients of financial organisations that have been the object of some type of online fraud and which have gone to the Complaints Department after failing to obtain a positive response from their organisation, and the solutions offered by the Complaints Department.

I am going to concentrate on the different cases resulting from the use of the e-Banking Services, as they have been causing most of the problems in the last years.