How to protect yourself against fraud - banking apps etc

[Jng1]

Was thinking about this after reading this story about a guy who had £18,000 stolen after his drink was spiked and his phone stolen

www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-59494524

There’s a lot in that report which isn’t explained:

• how did the fraudsters get into his phone - did they use fingerprint or facial recognition while he was unconscious?
• how did they set up overdrafts on his accounts - surely there would be additional security questions?

Obviously the best way to protect yourself is to not have banking apps on your phone and don’t use facial recognition etc but that’s not very convenient these days.

Any tech savvy folk here who have a checklist for how to protect yourself from being a victim of this kind of fraud?

I was also thinking about this in the context of my DS at uni. He has one bank account/bank card. If his phone /wallet was stolen and he needed to cancel his card he would be unable to pay for anything/ withdraw any money!
I think we need to think about some sort of back up for him - perhaps a card he leaves at home for a spare account he doesn’t use, but to which I could add money in an emergency?

I am with one of the banks mentioned in the article and I really don’t see how it was possible without a pin or password

Facial recognition doesn't work with eyes closed

Maybe they used fingerprints while he was unconcious? As for the to use a PIN or password, I don't know. I don't have facial or fingerprint recognition on my phone, because I can't be arsed to set it up, so I always need to enter a PIN, but perhaps the criminals had seen him enter his PIN earlier in the night? But I don't find it inconvenient to not use these things, it's not hard to enter a PIN when I need to.

I've certainly applied for an overdraft just by pressing a couple of buttons in an app, so the checking might not be in depth.

On the matter of having access to money in the event of phone and/or bank card loss everyone should have a back up account. It's basic common sense.

It's not just loss/theft of phones or cards, but sometimes bank systems have problems and every time there's a major outage that makes the news, which happens at least once or twice a year, there's always reports of people who say they're 'unable to buy food' or 'can't buy petrol so can't go to work so will lose money' and this could have been prevented by having a backup account with another bank.

Im unsure why he took all his debit cards out with him ? How did they get the PIN numbers to withdraw the cash ?

@userxx

Im unsure why he took all his debit cards out with him ? How did they get the PIN numbers to withdraw the cash ?

Yes, I agree. This story does feel a bit like it's whipping up fear about another element of drink spiking, but there's lots that doesn't make sense, at least based on my experience of mobile banking.

Interestingly, I was reading up on bank fraud etc after reading this and found that most cyber security experts agree that mobile banking (via your phone) is safer than online via PC banking, which is open to more risks.