Digital fraud has ceased to be isolated incidents in Argentina and today it is a massive concern. One in three Argentines claim to have been a victim of some type of hacking.
And there is data that illustrates the magnitude of the problem: Mondays are the day with the highest volume of complaints for fraud, phishing and credential theft in the country's financial institutions.
Artificial intelligence at the service of fraud
From the survey conducted by cybersecurity company CertiSur together with consulting firm D'Alessio IROL, it also emerges that phishing—the impersonation of digital identity to steal data—continues to be the main vector of attack.
But the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) tools has raised the level of sophistication. Cybercriminals can now generate highly personalized messages, replicate visual identities of brands and build fake sites that are practically indistinguishable from the originals.
"Digital fraud has evolved greatly in recent years. It's no longer enough to detect suspicious emails. Today attacks use AI to generate increasingly credible communications that are difficult for users to identify," explained Néstor Markowicz, operations director at CertiSur.
What banks are doing to respond
In response to the advance of these attacks, financial institutions began to reinforce their protection strategies. Among the technologies that are gaining ground are multifactor authentication (MFA), digital certificates, one-time password schemes (OTP) and secure encryption of communication channels.
There is also growing interest in digital onboarding solutions that combine biometry with AI-driven fraud detection, aiming to reduce risk from the first user contact with the platform.
How to verify that an email is legitimate
Another advancing front is confidence in digital communications. So-called VMC certificates allow displaying a verified brand logo directly in emails, which helps users distinguish legitimate messages from phishing attempts.
This technology targets one of the weakest points in the chain: the difficulty for the average user to identify whether an email purporting to be from their bank is real or not.
The challenge is also cultural
For CertiSur, the response to digital fraud cannot be limited to technology.
"Organizations need to combine education, continuous monitoring and identity validation technologies to reduce the impact of digital fraud. The challenge is no longer just protecting systems, but also protecting user trust," Markowicz concluded.
The survey, conducted with D'Alessio IROL, does not specify the methodology or sample size in the data released, so the figures should be read as indicative of a trend and not as official statistics.