Nigerian banks are becoming notorious for insider fraud. The so called hackers of customers’ accounts, diverting people’s money are rarely from outside of the bank, they are most likely those in charge of the management of the banks’ software infrastructure and customers data......Read The Full Article>>.....Read The Full Article>>
This is already at an alarming stage. People cannot be losing their money to so called fraudsters without action being taken against the holding banks. This criminal culture is destroying our banking system and making people lose trust in the entire banking sector. It is no more incidental or random, it is a calculated orchestration and it is already an epidemic.
The clique within the banks, across the banks, perpetrating these crimes are rather a cartel. There is no gain saying that even top management officers of the banks are not free from this shenanigans. There must be a deliberate action by the government to curb this in order to save our banking sector.
Whatever shenanigan that takes place in the banks regarding any illegal diversion of customer’s money should not be treated as administrative lapses or technical glitches anymore. It should now be treated as criminal conspiracy and criminal negligence by the banks and the bank staffers. Treating this criminality as system lapses or glitch and asking the bank to pay paltry fines is not more enough. Fines are not restitutions. Banks should now be mandated to pay restitutions at the exact amount that might have been illegally diverted from the customer’s account.
There should be 100% security and insurance payment for whatever a customer loses to hackers or fraudsters through the bank. It is a national embarrassment that banks will fail to provide verifiable KYC information of a customer when an account with them has been found to have been used to receive fraud money.
It is so embarrassing that an alleged criminal will be operating several bank accounts across the banks, with the same BVN to receive fraud money, yet, the banks cannot collect, monitor and retrieve the proceeds of the crime even when the victim-customer lodges prompt complaint. Sometimes, it becomes an herculean task to go through the court process to get an order to PND the suspected fraudulent account. This is not acceptable.
There should also be criminal liability on any complicit bank staffer. Sacking such complicit member of staff is not enough again, sending them to jail with the penalty to confiscate all their assets and paying restitution should be additional punishment.
At this critical time, with the spate of the insider conspiracy to compromise bank customers’ accounts, a state of emergency MUST be declared on bank fraud, insider dealings, illegal share conversion and other related banking frauds.
We must be concerned that Nigerians are fast losing confidence in the banks. So much illegalities going in the banks. Bankers now give private loans to third party with the money of the account they manage without the approval of the owner-customer.
Bank staffers often times divert customer’s money while shutting down the sms alert system of the customer until after the crime has been completed.
There is no way a hacker will call a customer to lure them to disclose their PIN while telling the victim-customer all their other biodata details except that the bank staffer with the knowledge of the customer’s data had compromised those details. It is often very difficult to hack into bank data unless the gateway is compromised by the staffer.
We need to ask ourselves – in all of the so called cyber attacks on bank accounts, why is it that the savings or profit account of the banks are rarely compromised. How come it is only the customer’s account that are mostly compromised. This is to tell you that the conspirators are the bank staffers themselves. This is why a very drastic action must be taken without further delay.
A lot of surcharges on customers’ accounts that cannot be justified. Customers just receive deductions that from their accounts that may appear small but in turn over, it becomes a lot whole wholly calculated.
I have a scenario where a bank staffer lured an old retiree woman to use her thumbprint right inside the bank to have access to her account just to divert all her money. It is that criminally audacious. No money is too small for these cartels. They pilfer through obnoxious illegal surcharging in smaller scale diversion to a bigger gain.
I have also seen a situation where the interbank clearing system was staled just to divert the transferred sum from one bank account to another bank account. It took the vigilance of the paying customer and the receiving customer to immediately raise the alarm and petition before the transaction was reversed quietly. A lot is so wrong with the banking system.
I have also seen a situation where a bank received money as taxes on behalf of a state government but refused to remit the actual amount to the coffer of the state government. It takes the intervention of law enforcement agency to recover the unremitted sum.
The audacity is so much that they now do it as a matter of “convention”. A lot is truly happening within the banking sector and it is destroying the sector.
At his juncture, it may be necessary that one of the existing anti-graft agencies in charge of financial crime control and intelligence be charged with additional responsibility to focus strictly on bank transactions relating to fraud complaints. The establishment law of any so chosen agency should be amended to further focus strictly on monitoring, preventing and punishing bank frauds. A very sophisticated software must be developed and put in place to prevent the crime and correct, on auto reverse where any complaint is made by the customer. These criminals cannot be smarter or bigger than the system.
Any of the agencies like EFCC, ICPC, NFIU, should be considered for this specialized and focused assignment. In my opinion, I think the NFIU should be chosen to do this job. It already has the financial intelligence infrastructure to monitor bank transactions. The law will only need to be amended and updated to add further assignments to posses such power to abort criminal activities, revert successful criminal transactions, sanction the bank and prosecute the conspiring bank staffer. This is an emergency and it should be treated as such.
However, if amending this law may contravene any so called international protocol on NFIU, then, a new agency should be established to take up this all important assignment. This is a national emergency and it should be treated as such. It should have such omnibus powers to scrutinize the banks and tame their transactions from conspiring to compromise the sector.
It is therefore important that this piece of advice is looked into and taken seriously with the aim of saving the already dilapidated banking system. We cannot allow criminals from within the sectors to destroy our economy. Banking is a critical sector of our economy and such cannot be managed by criminals. Any compromise of the banking system is a danger to the entire financial integrity of the nation. Such must be tackled right now without any iota of sentiment.
GOD IS HERE.
