From a Bank Technology News article titled Westpac, Other Banks Use Twitter to Warn of Fraud:
“When Westpac was recently targeted by web crooks, the Australian bank used another online venue to warn consumers, sending a Tweet warning consumers of the crime. The alert was part of a new trend—using social media to publicly expose online fraud attacks in real time—that Anti-Phishing Workgroup Chairman Dave Jevans says can be an effective way to spread security warnings, if it’s done right. Jevans says that if phishing and other attacks are corrupting trust in the email channel, it makes sense that banks would look to Twitter and other social media to alert their customers. By using Twitter, he says banks can warn customers instantaneously, without sending emails that could be construed as a malicious phishing attempt.”
Interestingly, Mr. Jevans is quoted later on in the article as saying that using Twitter “requires banks to be aware of how the Twitter, Facebook and other sites can be used by crooks themselves. Tweets could be used to spread false security alerts, similar to how email is used by fraudsters.” (I love that: “the” Twitter).
My take: It makes little sense to use Twitter for fraud notifications.
It’s not so much a security issue as it is a numbers game.
Pew Research Center reported in December 2010 that 8% of Americans use Twitter, and — more importantly — that just 2% of online adults used Twitter on an average day.
I haven’t seen any studies on this, but I would bet that the average Twitter user sees less than 10% of the messages that come through their Twitter stream.
More numbers: As reported on TheFinancialBrand.com:
“Less than one quarter-percent (0.021%) of all big bank customers follow their bank on Twitter. That translates to an average of 208 followers for every one million customers. BofA, the largest bank in the study, had 12,315 followers out of its 55 million customers. Wells Fargo averaged one follower for every 8,635 customers.”
For credit unions, “0.65% of members are connected to their credit union on Twitter. That’s one follower for every 155 members.”
Bottom line: Your response rate on direct mail credit card offers is probably higher than the hit rate of reaching customers on Twitter with important messages.
One potential solution to this could be a centralized Twitter account (maybe the CFPB could do something useful, here) that would be verified by Twitter. Banks could notify the CFPB who would then tweet the fraud notification. In this scenario, consumers would only have to follow one account, and would be assured of the legitimacy of the message.