outlines effective detection criteria to the previously
identified attack patterns and finally, Section 7
shows future research directions.
2 RELATED WORK
Direct Debit frauds are a modern topic in the
scientific community and, at the beginning of our
work, we were aware that no literature concerning
this argument was available. However, several are
the publications relating the detection of threats
against other forms of electronic payment. In
(D’Antonio, 2015) (Coppolino, 2015) authors
describe the advanced cyber threats, specifically
targeted to financial institutions and propose an
approach based on combining multiple and
heterogeneous data to detect frauds against a Mobile
Money Transfer (MMT). The research presented in
(Raj, 2011), denotes that in real life fraudulent
transactions are scattered with genuine transactions
and simple pattern matching techniques are not often
sufficient to detect those frauds accurately. The
work presents a survey of various techniques (Data
mining, Fuzzy logic, Machine learning...) used in
credit card fraud detection. (Patidar, 2011) shows
that the frauds tend to be perpetrated to certain
patterns and the use of Neural Network to detect
fraudulent transactions is presented. The paper
(Duman, 2011) suggests a novel combination of the
two well-known meta-heuristic approaches, namely
the genetic algorithms and the scatter search to
detecting credit card frauds. The method is applied
to real data and very successful results are obtained
compared to current practice. The research presented
in (Allison, 2005) proposes an analysis of the
identity theft and the related crimes.
3 SEPA DIRECT DEBIT
TRANSACTIONS
SEPA is the area where citizens, businesses,
governments and other economic actors can make
and receive euro payments. The jurisdiction of the
SEPA scope currently consists of the 28 EU
Member States (List, 2015), the members of
European Free Trade Association-EFTA (Iceland,
Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland), plus
Monaco and San Marino. The goal of the SEPA
project includes the development of financial
instruments, standards, procedures and
infrastructures to enable economies of scale. This
paper is focused on SEPA Direct Debit transactions
(SDDs), one of the services provided by SEPA.
Typical examples of SDD transactions are services
that require recursive payments such as pay per view
TV, gym subscription and energy distribution. The
actors involved in an SDD transaction are:
Creditor
In the SEPA Direct Debit (SDD) schema is the
person or company who has a credit that will be
satisfied by collecting funds from the Debtor’s bank
account through an SDD transaction.
Debtor
In the SEPA Direct Debit (SDD) schema is the
person or company who has a debit that satisfies by
providing funds from his/her bank account to the
Creditor’s bank account by means of an SDD
transaction.
Creditor’s and Debtor’s banks
They represent the respective banks of Creditor and
Debtor.
When a Creditor must draw funds from another
person’s bank account, to set up the process, he/she
has to acquire an SDD mandate from Debtor and
advise his/her bank about it. During each
transaction, the Creditor sends a direct debit request
(with information about the amount of the
transaction) to his/her bank that will start the process
to request the specified amount from Debtor’s bank
account. The Debtor must provide only the signature
of the mandate, but has no prior acknowledgement
about the direct debit being in charge to his/her bank
account. Usually, the Creditor sends a receipt to the
Debtor by using a best effort service, so no
guarantee about delivery time and delivery itself is
provided. In this process, the Debtor will have
knowledge of an unauthorized direct debit only
when the funds have already been withdrawn and
after reception of his/her bank statement. This of
course exposes the Debtor to a large number of
possible frauds. For these reasons, with SEPA, in
case of unauthorized transactions due to errors or
frauds, a Debtor can request refund until 8 weeks
from the SDD deadline or 13 months in case of an
unauthorized SDD. The SDD process (Figure 1 ) is
characterized by the following steps:
Acquisition
1) The mandate is signed by the Debtor and is
notified to the Creditor Bank.
Validation
1) The Creditor Bank sends a validation request for
the received mandate to the Debtor Bank.
2) The Debtor Bank receives the validation request
and returns its validation.