Bankers behind most ATM card frauds — ICT, legal experts

Some ICT experts have blamed bankers for most of the ATM card frauds in the country as the heinous practice by cyber criminals of cloning automated teller machine (ATM) cards and using them to defraud unsuspecting bank customers is on the rise

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.”

Former Second Vice President of the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA), Monday Onyekachi Ubani said “It is clearly sometimes the collusion of bank officials.”

“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.”

“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.

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

‘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 eyes carrying out sensitive operations without someone else overlooking it.

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

Explaining how to identify a compromised ATM machine, Illinois Bank & Trust in a post said the first step is to know what to look for and know the different kinds of skimming devices.

The most common ATM skimmer, and perhaps the easiest device to detect, is the card-reader overlay. It is made of plastic and fits over the slot where you insert your card.

A security expert and university don, Dr. Bala Abdulahi Husaini, lamented the rising cases of ATM cloning, noting that it has become a global phenomenon.

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““If you have an ATM card that has not been configured and you put it in a fridge to get to a certain degree Celsius, you can use it to withdraw money. It works.

“When you go to a shopping mall, you buy things slotting your card into the machine that also has memory. It stores your information. If they like, after you must have left, they can retrieve your pin number and start using it to your detriment.”