Michael McGrath (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputy for raising this issue. I am informed by the Central Bank that it does not collect this granularity of data in relation to the total number of victims of authorised push payment fraud or the compensation paid by payment service providers and payment institutions to victims of authorised push payment fraud.

The provisional crime statistics for 2022, released by An Garda Síochána, note that technology based fraud, including phishing, account takeover, card not present, online shopping fraud, which increased significantly during the Covid-19 pandemic, particularly in 2021, reduced during 2022. However, the Banking and Payments Federation has supplied data on the number of transactions affected by authorised payment fraud and the total value of those transactions from 2019 to 2021, noting that this information is not available for the years prior to 2019.

In 2019, there were 1,646 transactions with a gross loss of €10.3 million. In 2020, there was a significant rise associated with the Covid-19 pandemic with 2,947 transactions and a gross loss of €15.6 million. The trend continued in 2021, which saw 3,967 transactions and a gross loss of €16.8 million.

While the payment service directive, PSD2, set out the industry requirements concerning liabilities for unauthorised payment transactions and the applicable security requirements to help protect consumers against fraud, there is no requirement for payment services providers to compensate customers where authorised push payment fraud occurs. The Deputy will appreciate the actions they have taken to tackle the issue of payment fraud.

This matter is especially timely considering the upcoming review of the PSD2, which is being undertaken by the European Commission. The review is expected to cover a wide variety of areas related to the directive, including payment fraud.

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