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'Phishy' e-mail victim gets R200 000 refund (Part 1) |
| If fraud is due to bank's failure, the client will be reimbursed As I've been saying a lot lately, in these days of rampant bank fraud, you can't afford not to have your bank send you an SMS every time there's activity on your bank account. All the banks and banking organisations are also madly issuing warnings about card skimming, swapping, phishing, and all those other nasty tricks the fraudsters pull off in order to get their hands on our money. If you get caught, your only hope of getting all or some of your money back is if your bank's failure to follow procedure helped the baddies pull off the crime. And so it was that the Ombudsman for Banking Services (OBS) was able to reunite Bernie Dickson with R209 000 of the R331 000 he was swindled out of by fraudsters. The OBS is jointly funded by the banks, who've come to appreciate its role and abide by its decisions, 58% of which, incidentally, went in favour of complainants - that is, against the banks - last year. Annoyingly for journalists, the OBS is fond of trotting out case studies in order to illustrate its successes, but the good office never, ever names the banks involved. And this case is no exception. So back to Bernie. Picture the scene. He's walking along the beachfront with his wife on the morning of Saturday October 20 last year when he gets an SMS alerting him that R1 050 has been transferred from his cheque account into an account he doesn't recognise. While still trying to figure out what's going on, a second SMS beeps. Another R1 050 has gone in the same way. He decides to rush home and phone his bank's call centre. On the way, he gets another nine SMSs, advising him of 27 transfers out of his cheque account into strange accounts. Plus R230 000 had been transferred from his home loan access account into his cheque account. When Bernie gets home he makes that call to his bank, and a hold is put on his accounts. He tries to call his business partner to tell him what's happened, but he is told his SIM registration has failed. He later learns he's been the victim of a SIM swap. (Fraudsters, often with inside help, go to cellphone customer care desks, claim to have lost their cellphones, and apply for new ones, using their victim's cellphone number.) So the bank's automatically generated one-time-password - required for all new beneficiary payments - was sent to the fraudster instead of Bernie. In all, a total of R331 200 was fraudulently transferred from Bernie's current account, cheque account and credit card. How did they get his details? He'd fallen victim to a phishing scam, which means he received one of those e-mails claiming to be from his bank, asking him to enter all his banking details, and personal details, in order to update his Internet banking security, irony of ironies. But the e-mail was from a fraud syndicate. Banking Ombud Clive Pillay says the bank's system was too slow in notifying Bernie of the transfers, which meant the crooks got most the cash before he could put a hold on the accounts. Also, Pillay said, a bank is required to immediately halt activity on a customer's account when a fraud complaint is received, and notify all banks where the beneficiary accounts are held, to do likewise. • The OBS is a free dispute resolution service to all bank customers who have lodged complaints with their banks and are not happy with the outcome. To contact the OBS, call 0861OMBUDS (0861 662837). Cont 2/ . . . Click here to respond to this article - Your responses will get vetted and printed on "Have your Say" Click here if you would like to be alerted to new Crime Awareness articles. |
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