Amidst rising fraud, here’s how to secure your bank account

The advent of the Internet and the adoption of e-payment platforms as a convenient means of payment have increased the extent of occurrence of e-fraud and cyber-attacks in Nigerian banks.

Nigerian banks lost N3.5 billion between July and September 2020 to fraud-related incidences, representing a 534-per cent increase from the same period in 2019, when it was N552 million, according to a report by the Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System (NIBSS)

 The Industry Fraud Report found that the highest number of fraudulent cases (35.5% of the total) were committed on the web channel while transactions done over phones were responsible for a loss of N410 million (11.7%).

According to the NIBSS, the trend from the beginning of 2020 has been that the web and mobile channels are viable mediums for exponential fraudulent gains.

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The fifth annual edition of the 2022 Consumer Digital Banking Satisfaction Index report by Pan-African credit rating agency, Agusto & Co., also discovered that 59% of Nigerians have fallen victim to E-banking fraud in recent years.

The research stated that more than half of bank customers who partook in the survey indicated that they were defrauded through digital banking platforms, which they used for services such as funds transfer, account opening/account balance check, loan application, bills payment, airtime and data top-up, among others.

A cybersecurity enthusiast, Olalekan Oladehinde, said while attention has been paid to sophisticated way of defrauding customers through the internet, he argued that some elderly and not-too-lettered individuals are being defrauded in simple ways such as imposters posing as bank staffs, phone theft among others.

He said it is always important for customers to deactivate abandoned phone numbers linked to accounts by visiting the closest branch of their banks to deactivate such numbers or by removing abandoned phone numbers linked to accounts.

Financial Institutions Training Centre (FITC) in a report on fraud-related transactions in the first and second quarters of 2022, urged banks to further strengthen their internal control measures for improved efficiency in pre-empting fraud activities and ultimate prevention of fraud.