A legal basis has been established to share suspected information in real time across finance, telecommunications, and law enforcement to proactively block suspected voice phishing transactions.
The Financial Services Commission said on the 15th that a bill to amend the Special Act on the Prevention of Loss Caused by Telecommunications-Based Financial Fraud and Refund for Loss, which allows the sharing of suspected information in finance, telecommunications, and law enforcement on the voice phishing information-sharing and analysis artificial intelligence (AI) platform launched in Oct. last year, passed the National Assembly's plenary session.
According to the amendment, the term "accounts suspected of being related to fraud" was newly created to include not only the fraudster's accounts but also "victim accounts" as subjects of information sharing. Until now, financial companies could share only information such as accounts used for fraud and accounts with suspected transactions to suspend payments from the fraudster's accounts. There was no explicit legal basis to share victim accounts.
To ensure the safe operation of the platform (ASAP) that collects, analyzes, and shares suspected voice phishing information, the Financial Services Commission (FSC) can designate and announce information-sharing analysis institutions. The FSC plans to oversee them through various measures, including cancellation of designation, if an information-sharing analysis institution fails to fulfill its obligations.
To improve predictability, the items of information provided through ASAP were specified in detail, while allowing information-providing institutions to omit the data subject's consent when providing information to the information-sharing analysis institution. This reflects the recent characteristic of voice phishing to evade fund tracing by repeatedly transferring money to multiple accounts in a short period. The amendment is expected to take effect around July, six months after the law is promulgated.
An official at the Financial Services Commission (FSC) said, "Even in the secondary financial sector, where preemptive detection capabilities are relatively weak, it is expected that crime-linked accounts can be effectively subjected to payment suspension measures based on various new crime modus operandi data."