Plymouth and Lewisham Councils have decided to introduce an innovative new payment solution that will increase flexibility and simplify the management of benefits and other payments made by the Councils. Advanced Payment Solutions (APS), who is partnered with the Co-operative Bank, announced that it has won contracts to provide its award winning Cashplus® Prepaid MasterCard®…
Frog online learning platforms to schools and sQuid electronic payments network partnered to create and integrate a sQuid widget with the Frog learning platform. This lets parents view their child’s current sQuid account balance and to access their child’s sQuid account directly from their school’s Frog learning platform. This direct link to their sQuid account enables parents to top up their child’s account for cashless catering and school trip payments in the usual way, providing a seamless online customer journey for parents from Frog.
Advanced Payment Solutions (APS) has won contracts to provide prepaid card programs to Merton, Nottinghamshire and Bury councils. The three councils will enhance their benefit disbursement service to customers with prepaid “Cashplus” MasterCards from APS, which offers free multiple fund loads across the faster payments network via existing bank accounts. Removing cash and replacing it with prepaid cards has a number of benefits for councils including better security, more control and more transparent auditing of what is actually being spent by customers. Prepaid also eliminates cumbersome manual processes in getting funds to customers.
Consumers are placing themselves at serious
risk
of becoming fraud victims in the wake of a new crime that has arrived from the
US and is spreading across Britain, according to two surveys commissioned by
Experian, the information solutions company and leading provider of fraud
prevention solutions.
Bin raiding – the process of searching through bins to obtain personal
financial information to commit fraud – is growing at a phenomenal rate in the
UK but consumers remain unaware and, as yet, uninformed of its dangers. Bin
raiding is already widely recognized in the US, where it is known as dumpster
diving, with Americans being far more aware of the issue and taking much
greater care over how they discard their financial information.
To find out the extent to which people leave themselves vulnerable to identity
theft, Experian, in conjunction with Nottingham City Council and with the
support of Nottinghamshire Police, commissioned an independent, data
protection
registered research company to analyze the contents of hundreds of domestic
refuse bins under controlled, secure conditions, to see what people were
throwing away which could be useful to fraudsters. All data was anonymized to
ensure that nobody’s privacy was infringed.
The most worrying aspect of this new type of crime is that consumers continue
to discard significant quantities of personal financial information which can
and are being used by fraudsters to commit transaction fraud and identity
theft. The results of this research showed that:
· On average one in every five bins contains a whole credit or debit card
number
linked to an individual name and 80 percent of these have an associated
expiration
date. In more affluent areas, up to two in five bins (40 per cent) contains a
whole credit or debit card number linked to an individual name and 80 percent
of these have an associated expiration date.
· Only 14 percent of household rubbish bins contain absolutely no information
of interest to fraudsters.
· Almost three quarters (72 per cent) of bins contain the full name and full
address of at least one household member.
· Bank account details are regularly found in bins and, on average, one in
every
five bins contains a bank account number and sort code that could be
related to
the full name and address of a household member. In more affluent areas, 27
percent of bins contains bank account numbers and sort code details.
· Only rarely were attempts made to destroy information. Just eight per
cent of
households throwing away full card numbers had made attempts to destroy the
documents, and only one percent of households had been successful.
In a second survey commissioned by Experian to find out how widespread the
problem of bin raiding is, it was revealed that 75 percent of local
authorities admit that bin raiding is regularly taking place in their area
and,
of these, 80 percent agree that the problem is getting worse.
“It is staggering what people throw away,” commented Gareth Jones, Head of
Fraud at Experian. “One bin contained a signed blank cheque and another an
unused cheque book. From one bin, there was an individualÂs full name,
address,
date of birth, bank account number, sort code, employment details, and medical
information. This person had also thrown away a whole benefit book, utility
bill, and other official letters that might be used to corroborate identity.
There was also significant information about this person contained in a
completed passport application.
“Just as worrying is how widespread bin-raiding has already become. While
it is
predominantly an urban phenomenon at this stage, it is already spreading into
rural areas. Not one local authority surveyed denied that bin-raiding
occurs in
their area.”