Andrew Vine: Why fraud is on the cards for shoppers at Christmas

Not, though, for a friend of mine, thanks to the debit card fraudsters rubbing their hands in glee at the prospect of a bumper season not of goodwill to all men, but theft from as many as possible.

They have plundered his current account. More than half the money in it was stolen before he noticed the withdrawals and notified his bank, which blocked all further transactions.

It leaves him high and dry until the mess is sorted out, frantically ringing round all the organisations to whom he pays direct debits every month to ensure he doesn’t default on his mortgage, council tax, mobile phone, broadband and all the other bills.

His bank is being very good, and will refund the stolen money, but it’s going to be a week or so before everything is sorted out and new account details issued. Until then, he’s scraping by on what’s left in his wallet.

I knew exactly how he felt, because the same thing has happened to me in the past. The realisation that my card details had been stolen and money extracted from my account brought with it an unpleasant, hollow feeling.

My losses were nothing like as bad as his, and the unsettling realisation that somebody had been able to reach into my bank account soon turned to frustrated anger at the certainty nobody would be caught or punished for it.

His instinct is that his debit card was cloned at a restaurant in Birmingham where he ate whilst on business in the city, because that had been the only unfamiliar transaction he had made in a month or more.

The problem is he hasn’t a shred of evidence. It might have happened months before at a shop or restaurant he knows well, and his details sold on by a criminal gang. It might even have been a device attached to a cash machine that recorded his card and PIN.

He’ll never know for sure, just as I’ll never know who managed to steal my details and withdraw £100 from a cash machine in London before using a card in my name to buy a games console from a shop in Tottenham Court Road whilst I was at work in Yorkshire.

There are going to be a lot more people who have that nasty, sinking feeling at realising their accounts have been compromised in the weeks running up to Christmas, because fraud is happening on an industrial scale.

The figures are staggering and suggest that fraudsters are staying one step ahead in the never-ending battle by banks to keep their customers’ money where it belongs instead of being funnelled into the pockets of criminals.

A couple of months ago, figures for the first half of 2014 revealed that fraud on debit and credit cards was up by 15 per compared to the previous year, totalling an eye-watering £247.6m.

That astronomical sum becomes all the more galling because the fraudsters appear to operate with impunity. There can be little doubt that those who stole my card details, or those of my friend, are professional thieves who move endlessly from victim to victim, secure in the knowledge that the odds are overwhelmingly in their favour against getting caught.

The boom in online shopping has given them rich new pickings, at least amongst unwary customers, but then an unintended consequence of the move of the whole of society towards cashless transactions has been to open up new opportunities for fraudsters.

We have no option but to take on trust that the reader into which we insert our debit or credit card is not rigged to clone it, or the person to whom we give our details over the phone is honest.

Without that trust, the economy would grind to a halt, because operating solely in cash long ago became unrealistic.

But some elements of a more traditional way of doing things remain as valuable today as they ever were. My bank still has the most sophisticated, fail-safe, fraud-proof system in place to ensure that as many transactions as possible remain absolutely secure. It cannot be overridden by an ingenious piece of software, nor outsmarted by sleight of hand with a card reader.

It comes in the form of a group of unfailingly pleasant and experienced cashiers, who know their customers, greet them by name and would know immediately if an identity thief presented themselves at the counter.

It can’t be any coincidence that the staff have noticed an upturn in the number of customers doing as much business as they can face-to-face as the volume of fraudulent transactions and card fraud continues to rise.

Still, there will be no option this Christmas but to take the leap of faith that the shops and websites we use are honest. Most undoubtedly are. Even so, we would all be wise to put vigilance at the top of our shopping lists.