Leading fraud prevention expert, Equifax, is urging lenders to take action as figures from CIFAS, the UK’s Fraud Prevention Service, show that fraudulent applications rose by over 20% in 2007 compared to 2006. And worryingly, the numbers of fraudulent applications that succeeded in being granted credit were up by nearly 65% year on year.

Equifax believes these figures demonstrate that lenders need to do more to reduce this threat to their financial stability, especially at a time when margins are already under severe pressure.

“CIFAS figures show that throughout 2007 both successful and unsuccessful application fraud attempts were on the rise with over 13,000 more cases reported”, confirmed Neil Lewis, Head of Fraud & ID products at Equifax. “With successful fraudulent applications up over 60%, fraudsters are clearly becoming ever more inventive and lenders need to deploy more sophisticated data sharing solutions than have been tradionally used or fraud losses will increase. And this is not a good prospect given the overall pressure on the financial services sector at the moment.”

SIRAN, Equifax’s online application fraud detection system, addresses the need for businesses from all sectors, including banks, retail credit providers, credit card issuers, mobile telecommunications and mail order suppliers to share their application and fraud data in order to prevent fraud by uncovering irregularities in the information supplied by the applicant and revealing undisclosed addresses.

“With granted frauds so significantly increased year on year, it is crucial that the lending industry maximises the benefiits of data sharing” confirmed Neil Lewis. “Today’s solutions need to deliver fully flexible cross matching techniques that can be fine tuned by users to try to stay ahead of the fraudsters.

“The unique combination of online application and fraud information and intelligent fraud management tools, makes SIRAN the first choice for any organisation keen to take its fraud prevention capabilities to the next level.”