Push Payments Frauds are frauds against the senders of payments, usually sent through the Faster Payments Service, where a payer has been persuaded, tricked or misled into either sending a payment for a fraudulent service, or a legitimate payment to a fraudster’s account. In the first half of 2020 reported losses associated with these Authorised Push Payments Frauds were £207.8m. Only £73.1m of these losses were returned to customers by their banks, the remaining loss of £134.7m had to be absorbed by the impacted consumers and small businesses themselves. Many of these frauds involve the interception and changing of the Bank Sort Code and Bank Account Number that has been sent by the payee to the payer. A consumer might have a computer virus on their PC that checks each incoming email for invoices and bank details, replacing them with a fraudster’s account. Many of these receiving accounts are known as ‘mule’ accounts where potentially vulnerable consumers have been persuaded to make their bank account available to the fraudster, typically for a slice of the payment as reward. The ability of the fraudsters to quickly move payments around the UK banking systems from mule account to account makes them hard to catch. The introduction of Confirmation of Payee services is making this form of fraud harder, as the payer will need to know the name of the receiving account. The payer may be alerted if this is different from the name of the person they thought they were paying, but social engineering, where a fraudster may suggest that the unusual name of the account is actually a security feature, means this is not a perfect protection. Although the risk of this type of fraud sits legally with the paying customer, when these events hit the business trying to collect payment is also indirectly impacted by the loss to their customer, delaying the payment they were due to get, and negatively impacting customer relationships. Once hit by such a fraud, this often drives understandable protective behaviour from payers, like calling up a business to validate payment details, or even making a small test payment and then calling up the business, that drives further cost and inefficiency on to the business trying to get paid. By protecting the payee’s bank details from any interception, open banking payments services like Ordo can prevent many of these types of fraud.