The volume of fraud in the national financial system is expected to reach R$ 2.5 billion this year. And the estimate assumes that a significant part of this value – around R$ 1.8 billion, or more than 70 – has to do with Pix, the Central Bank's (BC) instant payments system, which went into operation in 2020 and quickly became popular.

The banks' estimate for the end of 2022, obtained by the Estadão agency, takes into account data until June - a period in which fraud cases already totaled R$ 1.7 billion, of which R$ 900 million via Pix.

Financial system sources say that this number may be underestimated, as not all frauds are reported to banks by customers. There is no official consolidated number, but as operations have become more digitalized during the pandemic, fraud is estimated to have tripled in two years.

Research carried out by Serasa Experian revealed that in May 2021 a total of 331.2 thousand Brazilians were victims of some type of fraud, with more than 176 thousand cases (53.3) originating from bank accounts or credit cards – two months earlier , in March, the number was 79,900. The study analyzes numbers related to crimes such as identity forgery, account opening and unauthorized card issuance.

The anti-fraud arm of Boa Vista's credit monitoring service, Konduto, also identified the severity of the problem: from January to April this year alone, there were around 9 million fraud attempts involving credit card cloning and theft of personal information in commerce. In April alone there were 2 million events, 117 more than in the same month last year.

In addition to data theft by hackers, another type of crime that has been growing in the country is fraud classified as social engineering, which consists of psychologically manipulating the user into revealing confidential information, such as card and account passwords. A recent survey by the Brazilian Confederation of Banks (Febraban) showed an increase of 165 in this type of scam since the beginning of the pandemic. According to the association, one in three Brazilians suffered this attempted coup this year.

Financial fraud is a global problem that appears to be comparatively more serious in Brazil. In a February 2022 study, IBM revealed that 31 of Brazilians said they had suffered some type of credit card fraud in the last year. In Germany, for example, there were 7 and in the USA 18.

Brazil is a hostile market that has a public security problem, says Fabiana Saenz, security specialist at Zetta, an association that represents fintechs – start-ups in the financial sector – in Brazil. When we present Brazilian fraud cases at international cybersecurity forums, foreigners are quite impressed with the way criminals work here, says José Luis Santana, head of cybersecurity at C6 Bank.

Nubanks' director of institutional relations, Bruno Magrani, says that a group was formed to discuss security improvements with the central bank. This group includes Zetta, Febraban, Abipag (Brazilian Association of Payment Institutions), Abranet (Brazilian Internet Association) and ABBC (Brazilian Association of Banks).

One of the ideas discussed today is cascading blocking of attacking accounts. One of the characteristics of criminals is that they move money between multiple accounts very quickly. The current process of banning a scam victim's account is very time-consuming. Our idea is to be able to immediately block accounts that route money through different financial institutions, says Magrani.

The president of the Central Bank, Roberto Campos Neto, has already signaled his concern about the issue of fraud. In a hearing in the Chamber of Deputies, he spoke about the work of preventing orange accounts opened with other people's documents without authorization. This is an attempt to improve tracking of stolen money.

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