Banks Are Secretly Monitoring Smartphone Habits To Detect Fraud

We all use our phones differently. For example some of us love injecting emojis into our text messages, some of us have certain words that we’ve shortened to make it easier to understand, some of us use our phones and favor our left/right hands, and so on. To that end, it appears that these are habits that banks are secretly monitoring to help detect fraud.

In a report from the New York Times (via 9to5Mac), it mentions how there are some banks that monitor how their clients use their phones when they log into their mobile banking app. They cite the Royal Bank of Scotland’s app which will record more than 2,000 different gestures, such as the angle in which people hold their phones, the fingers that they use to swipe and/or to tap, the pressure, the speed of their scrolling, and more.

The report also cites how they managed to prevent fraud when they detected that a client had logged into their account, but the system picked up on how this particular user used a mouse scroll wheel, and used the numerical row on top of the keyboard instead of the number pad. This set off alarm bells (not literal ones) and so the bank then blocked any attempts to from the user to remove cash from the account.

A later investigation proved their findings to be accurate as the account was indeed hacked. While this sounds like an excellent system to have in place, naturally being tracked has raised some concerns with privacy advocates, especially if third-party vendors are the ones supplying the software, which one has to wonder what the data might be used for, and what could be gleaned should it be leaked?

Tyler Lee
Categories: General
Tags: Privacy, Security