How much thought do you put into your PIN? Is it someone’s birthday? Your vital statistics? You would think that people would try to protect their bank account balance or credit limit to the best of their ability, but you’d be surprised. A startling number
of consumers still put little effort into determining a PIN.
Recent research [Data Genetics] confirms the fact that many consumers choose easy combinations or number patterns which are an open wallet for fraudsters. In fact, with just three combinations,
they could swoop into nearly 20% of accounts and clean them out.
The result? A fraudster doesn’t need to be Dynamo the magician to gain access to a significant haul. In the end banks are typically the ones footing the bill for the crime. Rather than take the hit, shouldn’t we be finding new ways to encourage customers
create less obvious PINs?
Banks already recognise the importance of secure PIN creation and invest significant time and effort in communicating this to the customer. Unfortunately the advice seems to be falling on deaf ears. In order to get this message through to their customers
and close the loophole, they’ll need to take a different tack. Banks should devise alternative ways to hammer the message home, look at more sophisticated authentication methods to keep the fraudsters at bay and perhaps block the use of those three “magic”
numbers.