Commercial bank staff collude with fraudsters to empty depositors' accounts

Disturbing revelation from the banking Industry are now showing how staff of commercial banks is colluding with electronic fraudsters to empty depositors' accounts. The fraud scam involving theft of customers' identification data aims at siphoning their funds with the aid of employees of financial institutions is on the rise.


Investigations conducted showed that insiders in financial institutions in Nigeria are increasingly taking advantage of highly confidential information of customers and trading same to outsiders for illegal profits.


This is to say that with the help of people on the inside, the fraud ring is now able to recruit people to assume stolen identities and withdraw funds because they knew the banks affected did not have sufficient technology and security to safeguard the customers' information or alert the institutions when it was stolen. In several other schemes, fraudsters wire out text or e- mail messages asking bank customers to update their ac- count information pretending to be coming from their banks, or informing them that they have won mouthwatering cash in return for details of their bank accounts which are sub- sequently emptied, once made available.


There is also phishing mails that are not limited to Advance fee fraud, purchase frauds, counterfeit postal money orders, online automotive fraud, counterfeit cashier's check scam, cash the check system, PayPal Fraud, business opportunity or "Work-at-Home" schemes, money transfer fraud, dating fraud, and charity fraud and boisterous employment promises. However, the Commissioner of Police in charge of the Force Special Fraud Unit, Ikoyi Lagos, Mr. Tunde Ogunsakin, disclosed that from January this year, the unit investigated about 600 cases of fraud in financial institutions. According to him, in all the cases, the frauds were commit- ted in connivance with bank staff.


This is coming as the US State Department's 'Money Laundering Report 2013' dubbed Nigeria as a significant center for criminal financial activity.' Matt Baechtle, leading a team of United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Department of Homeland Security, to collaborate with SFU for the purpose of fine-tuning measures on how to tackle the threat posed by cyber-attackers, said that internet fraudsters and corrupt officials and business people, as well as criminal and terrorist organisations are allegedly taking advantage of the country's location, porous borders, weak laws and lack of enforcement to perpetrate cyber-crime.


Ogunsakin also identified problems and challenges in handling bank frauds to include lack of well equipped forensic laboratories, lack of data base of criminals, inadequate legislation, cost of investigation, inadequate working tools, inadequate collaboration with private sector and inadequate international collaborative framework.

The Sun