Bankers behind most ATM card frauds —ICT, legal experts

Relying on their wealth of experience, some ICT experts told The Nation that bankers are responsible for most ATM card frauds.

One of them, Bayo Banjo, said: “Most bank frauds are insider jobs. We haven’t had a situation where professional hackers would come and do everything from outside.

“The most common is from within the bank and the next is about being careless with your card.”

He described Ayo’s experience where the fraud was said to have been committed using an online payment portal as strange.

He said: “It could be that a staff of the online payment organisation is lifting details. How can someone duplicate that if it is not an insider’s job?

“If no code was sent to the owner of the account before payment was made, the first person they should hold responsible is the online portal.

“That is why every company that handles payment portals that read your card has to get thorough approval and have so many safety methods.

‘For instance, Interswitch will send a code by SMS to process transactions. But other ones that are external to the country are not detailed. They will just take your card number and the three digits at the back and the computer will check that the name matches the expiry date matrix.

“With those ones, you can read the details of someone’s cards. The banks should also put in place necessary control so that they can tell where the fraud is coming from.”

Former Second Vice President of the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA), Monday Onyekachi Ubani, shared Banjo’s line of thought.

“It is clearly sometimes the collusion of bank officials,” he said.

“The moment this thing happens and you come to them, they will first of all accuse you of compromising your pin. It is always the first accusation they will haul at you and you will begin to defend yourself. It then becomes my word against your own.

“But most times, if a deeper investigation is carried out by the security agencies, it will actually underpin those that are behind this criminal act. Most times, the banks don’t even give out information for that comprehensive investigation to be done.”

Ubani proceeded to share a disturbing experience of how a bank used his client’s details to open an account for suspected fraudsters.

He said: “I have a particular case now and, in fact, we are filing the suit this week against a bank where my client has a corporate account. The bank went and opened the same corporate account to fraudsters who are using that name to dupe people of various sums of money running into millions.

“The People they dupe will pay big money into the fraudulent account and they (fraudsters) will pay about N100,000 into the genuine account. They were doing this in collusion with the bank officials.

“Before you know it, they will empty the fraudulent account and take out all the money. The person who has paid the money would complain to the police who will block our client’s account.

“My client will say I never had any dealings with this person that paid N100,000. Meanwhile, it is the same company’s name. When you go and check this company’s name, it will be changed to an individual’s name in the same bank.

“Meanwhile, the payer would have paid into a corporate account.  There is no way that would have happened without an insider’s collusion.

“Luckily for us, we have a print out where this money was paid into the company’s account. The bank has quickly paid the lawyer who is coming to give evidence in our favour.

“There is a lot of evil going on in the banking sector. Bank officials now take undue advantage of the fiduciary relationship of trust. Bankers we used know were the most trustworthy people on earth.

“When you begin to have armed robbers in the banking sector, you know that that bank is not safe and people’s money is not safe.”

Lamenting the magnitude of compromise in the banking sector, Olusola Teniola, an ICT expert, advised that banks must adopt what he called four eyes system to check internal fraud.

Teniola said: “Banking is about trust. They have to ensure that their staff or employees have effective background checking.

‘The system that they actually adopt into their processes or business model should be able to have what I call four eyes. By this I mean there shouldn’t be an individual with a pair of eye carrying out sensitive operations without someone else overlooking it.

“The four eyes principle is the most effective way to find out if there is connivance. There is no way two people can deny a crime. It is easier for one person to deny and the other one knows that they committed the crime.

“The four eyes principle is the best way I think banks would have adopted in addition to ensuring that the systems are operated by trustworthy employees.”

He implored banks to move from using text message and emails to alert customers to fraudulent practices to embarking on mass campaign, using local languages.

“We are in a society that is evolving. Our educational system needs to be improved because we have a high percentage of young people who cannot read and write. The jingle of speaking in their dialect is much more appropriate in terms of communicating than using text messages in English.”