How we prevent fraudulent transactions

Published on May 12, 2020 | Kevin Thompson

You’ve just received an automated phone call from someone claiming to be “fraud prevention” calling on behalf of Webster Bank. They want to verify recent debit card transactions with you, but you know that you haven’t used your card in days. Now you’re thinking this could be a phishing callÉor not. Maybe someone else made the fraudulent transactions in question!   We’ve talked about how debit and credit cards become compromised, and we’ve talked about how to prepare for a vacation so that your card continues to work while out of town, but what is the bank doing to prevent fraudulent transactions? Like most other card issuers, Webster Bank has a group dedicated to protecting your money and preventing fraudulent debit card transactions from hitting your checking account.

How we spot and prevent fraudulent transactions from hitting your account

• Neural networks monitor all card activity to help detect and prevent fraudulent transactions from being authorized (once authorized, transactions must be paid). The system looks for suspicious transactions outside of your normal spending habits.
• Identification of points of compromise and isolation of the cards that could be used for fraudulent activity, and reissuing new cards to those affected customers.
• Webster has internal authorization strategies that attempt to decline fraudulent transactions based on known fraud patterns.
• Daily purchase and withdrawal limits help to limit the losses if transactions are missed by our fraud monitoring systems.

Back to that weird phone call about suspicious transactions. This is a service that Webster uses to help reach our customers to verify whether or not the suspicious transactions are fraudulent. This service monitors card activity and fraud trends for card issuers all over the country and they use all of that information to identify possible fraud.

When a transaction, or a series of transactions, is determined to be suspicious, an automated phone call will be made to the customer to verify the transactions. In some cases, they will block the card to prevent further transactions. The confirmation of fraud or no fraud helps them to adjust their strategies to narrow down specific fraudulent merchants and purchase patterns.  

If you have questions about the validity of one of these calls, please contact Webster Bank at 800-325-2424 and we can help determine if they would have tried to reach you or not.

These various layers of security could also deny legitimate transactions, which can be an inconvenience, but so can an empty checking account due to fraudulent transactions.

How to help protect yourself

• Make sure Webster has your current phone numbers
• Notify Webster if you plan to make some large transactions that deviate from your normal spending
• Monitor your accounts daily

  ItÕs never fun to become the victim of fraud, and weÕre working hard to prevent that from happening.