Securing Your Debit Card —
How Everlink Beats the Fraudsters

June 18, 2019 –Canadians’ love affair with debit cards grows stronger each year, in fact there were more than 5.8 billion Interac transactions made in Canada in 2018 alone*.  Worldwide, the story is much the same as debit card use continues to soar and, according to the Canadian Payments Forecast published by Technology Strategies International (TSI), will likely be the leading method of payment by 2022, narrowly surpassing credit cards. However, with this kind of popularity, debit cards are an obvious target for fraud.

Debit card fraud in Canada has been addressed largely via the move from a magnetic stripe to EMV chip and PIN technology. However, fraud is constantly evolving and becoming increasingly sophisticated. As well, the growth of mobile debit payments will almost certainly create new fraud opportunities. Unfortunately, card fraud is so lucrative and comparatively risk-free, that it has become the number one focus of organized crime. Clearly, this represents an ongoing and serious threat for Financial Institutions (FIs) and payments companies. At Everlink, fraud prevention is a key priority as we work to stay ahead of the criminals behind it.

How Everlink Secures Debit Card Payments

Everlink offers around-the-clock fraud monitoring for debit card payment transactions in Canada. Our focus includes known fraud trends and suspicious activity such as location vs. time disparities, “travelling cards” which continue to be used at the holiday destination after the cardholder has returned home, and unusual velocity counts for transaction volumes and dollar values.

Our fraud prevention process begins when an alert is generated via eDETECT™.  Launched two years ago, eDETECT™ is a state-of-the-art, rules-based, fraud monitoring tool that assesses risk in real time and immediately secures the cardholder’s account, if warranted.  We also layer in an additional level of protection through our scoring engine eSCORE™.  Leveraging adaptive machine learning regression models,  eSCORE™ assesses  various data points on each transaction to determine the likelihood of it being fraudulent. This leads to higher fraud detection rates and fewer false-positive alerts.

Human intervention is then applied through various case management teams which perform a first-level triage review to ensure flagged accounts are protected against further fraudulent transactions and to dismiss alerts if they are false positives. False positives occur when a suspected fraudulent transaction is being conducted by a legitimate cardholder. Finally, the issuing institution contacts their cardholder to validate a highly suspicious alert and, if required, issues a new card where compromise is confirmed. Fraud-related data captured through the experience is fed into Everlink’s detection/prevention model to make eDETECT™ even more robust and predictive of fraud in the future.

eDETECT™ Fraud Prevention Results

eDETECT™ has been remarkably successful. In 2018, there were approximately 107,000 fraud alerts generated of which 11,735 were confirmed fraud, with a false positive ratio of only 9.12:1, which attests to the accuracy of the system. Overall, eDETECT™ achieved a loss prevention of 47% for our clients through declined transactions.

In addition to the fraud prevention efforts Everlink makes behind the scenes, there are a number of things debit cardholders can do themselves to reduce the risk of fraud. First, where possible tap your debit card on the POS device vs. inserting the chip and entering your PIN. Tap (or Flash®) now accounts for 40% of all debit card transactions. It’s the safer way to pay with a debit card, even though many mistakenly believe that inserting the card and entering their PIN is more secure. Tapping means the card does not leave your hand, which reduces the risk of it being run through a portable skimmer. Also, because the PIN is not entered, it is not exposed to “man in the middle” attacks by which fraudsters are able to capture both the PIN and enough data from the chip to create counterfeit cards.  As another form of fraud prevention, lost or stolen debit cards have a $200 maximum accumulative spend limit without the PIN, so PIN protection is key.

Second, Everlink provides debit cardholders with the power to control access to their debit cards, when and where they want. With Lock’N’Block®, cardholders simply log into their mobile or online banking app and click on the Lock’N’Block® icon. An image of the card they have registered appears with a toggle that enables the cardholder to “Lock” or “Unlock” their debit card. Cardholders can lock their card completely, or lock specifically from international use while allowing domestic transactions.

While cyber fraud is an evolving and endless reality, Everlink is committed to finding new and better ways to protect our customers and stay ahead of the bad guys.

*2018 Canadian Payment Methods and Trends, Payments Canada