Theano Thiopoulou
Most of the card fraud in Cyprus at 91% is done with internet or telephone payments, 2% of fraudulent transactions are made at physical point of sale (POS) terminals, such as face-to-face payments at retail stores or restaurants and 6% via ATMs.
In the ECB report on card fraud published last Friday, in contrast to card payments in general, for almost all EU countries fraud is mainly related to cross-border payments.
In 19 Member States, cross-border fraud accounted for more than 90% of the total value of card fraud issued in the respective country in 2019.
In several countries, the share of cross-border fraud was close to 100% of the total fraud (eg Bulgaria, Cyprus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Slovakia).
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Only in a few countries, mostly larger, domestic markets such as France and the United Kingdom, and to a lesser extent Ireland and Germany, fraudulent domestic trade seems to play a more important role (representing between 21% and 47% of total fraud).
The total value of fraudulent card transactions issued within SEPA amounted to 1.87 billion euros in 2019. For cards issued only in the euro area, the total value of fraudulent card transactions amounted to 1.03 billion. Fraud as a percentage of the total value of transactions decreased in 2019, as fraud in absolute terms increased at a slower rate than total card payments. The total value of total card transactions issued under SEPA and acquired worldwide increased by 6.5% compared to 2018, while the corresponding fraud increased by 3.4%. As a result, fraud as a percentage of the total value of transactions decreased by 0.001 percentage points to 0.036% in 2019. During the five years between 2015 and 2019, the lowest share of fraud was observed in 2017 (0.035%), which was the lowest rate recorded since the start of data collection in 2007. A share of 0.036% means that on average 3.6 cents were lost from fraud for every € 100 transaction using cards issued within SEPA in 2019. For cards issued in the euro area, The value of fraud as a share of total card transactions in 2019 remained below SEPA's share of 0.032% overall, although it increased slightly from 0.031% in 2018.
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