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Increased bank card fraud among clients of Norwegian banks

Xinhua, November 5, 2016 Adjust font size:

Thousands of Norwegian bank clients have to get new bank cards as a bank card fraud increases in Norway, newspaper VG reported on Friday.

Two biggest banks in Norway, Nordea and DNB, have confirmed that some of their clients had been affected by security breach when paying in a popular online store.

According to the report, it was revealed on Thursday that 150,000 bank clients in Denmark and Norway would have to replace their bank cards with new ones, after they had shopped in an unnamed online store. 45,000 of the them are in Norway.

Many of the affected people are clients of several Norwegian savings banks who have used the services of the company Nets, which monitors possible deviations in the payment flow.

"We have sent a notice to 5,000 clients that they should replace their cards after a possible safety breach connected to the online store," Christian Steffensen, chief press officer at Nordea, told VG.

DNB said that it had not sent a mass announcement to their clients.

"We have had some fraud cases related to the mentioned website and handle it in the usual way. It is detected by our system and we will make a call to the customer," information advisor of DNB Andreas Nyheim said, adding that the bank monitors the use of bank cards and tries to stay ahead and get an overview of future fraud trends.

"When concrete incidents occur, we naturally follow up on this with an extra care. When it is necessary we will implement preventive measures to make sure that the clients will not be affected. In the cases where we detect abuse, we do the follow up directly with the customer. Our clients are not affected by the Nets' call for cancellation of cards," Nyheim said.

According to VG, the company Nets has still not released the information about the online store mentioned in the case.

"The only common denominator we have is that the cards were used in this online store at some time or other. This could thus be a completely innocent third party and a warning not to shop in the online store out of preventive considerations could correct erroneous focus on the online store," Stein-Arne Tjore, press officer of Nets Norway told online newspaper E24.

"Since we do not know what is the reason that the card data have gone astray and how this has happened, we cannot name an online store," Tjore concluded.

Nets does not have any direct relation to the online store and therefore has no mandate to conduct its own investigations. Nets has to instead report it to the international card companies, like Visa and MasterCard, that will then investigate the online store and the event more closely. Endit