Monzo, a UK-based digital bank, has introduced a new ‘call status’ feature in its app to protect its eight million customers from impersonation scams, where scammers pose as trusted organizations to trick people into transferring money.
Facts
- Impersonation scams involve scammers pretending to be from trusted organizations and manipulating account holders into transferring money.
- These scams cost UK consumers £177.6 million across 45,367 instances in the past year, as digital banking services continue to rise.
- Monzo, a major player in the UK’s digital banking market, has introduced the ‘call status’ feature to verify the authenticity of incoming calls, allowing customers to report suspicious incidents.
- Priyesh Patel, a senior staff engineer at Monzo, describes this feature as an “industry-first” additional layer of security to combat increasingly sophisticated scams.
- Monzo has joined the Stop Scams UK initiative to collaborate in preventing scams and also utilizes Mastercard’s AI-powered Consumer Fraud Risk solution to fight real-time payment fraud.
- Mark Tierney, CEO of Stop Scams UK, welcomes Monzo’s call status feature as a crucial innovation in protecting people from fraud by verifying trusted authorities during financial phone calls.
