The FBI issued a press release earlier today highlighting concerns about an increase in ACH-based fraud targeting online banking credentials of small businesses, governments and school districts.

From the press release: "Within the last several months, the FBI has seen a significant increase in fraud involving the exploitation of valid online banking credentials belonging to small and medium businesses, municipal governments, and school districts. In a typical scenario, the targeted entity receives a “spear phishing” e-mail which either contains an infected attachment, or directs the recipient to an infected website. Once the recipient opens the attachment or visits the website, malware is installed on their computer. The malware contains a key logger which will harvest each recipient’s business or corporate bank account login information. Shortly thereafter, the perpetrator either creates another user account with the stolen login information or directly initiates funds transfers by masquerading as the legitimate user. These transfers have occurred as both traditional wire transfers and as ACH transfers." READ MORE

The Association for Financial Professionals reports results from its 2008 AFP Payments Fraud and Control Survey concluding that" "payments fraud continues to challenge treasury and finance professionals, with almost one third of respondents to a new AFP survey reporting that incidents of fraud increased in 2007 compared to 2006."

Memento has introduced a solution to address the escalating Automated Clearing House (ACH) fraud problem. The company says that "through proactive monitoring and detection, Memento Security, the company’s flagship platform, quickly identifies fraudulent activities that include identity fraud, kiting, reverse phishing, insider fraud and counterfeiting."

Separately, Memento announced that Shirley Inscoe and Mike Mulholand have joined the company. Inscoe, former Senior Vice President of Enterprise Payments Strategy at Wachovia, will be Memento’s Director of Financial Services Solutions. Mulholand, former Vision Risk Product Marketing Manager at banking and payments technology provider Metavante, has been named Director of Fraud Solutions Strategy.