Nigerian Bank Customers Lose N42.7Bn to Fraudsters in 3 Months- Report
Nigerian Bank customers lost a whopping N42.755 billion to fraudulent activities perpetrated through social engineering in just three months.
Social engineering occurs when fraudsters trick individuals to reveal personal data that could be used to access their bank accounts.
Many Nigerians were and are still being defrauded mainly through social engineering in the heat of the COVID-19 pandemic and thereafter.
Experts have warned Nigerians to avoid releasing sensitive information to strangers with increasing penetration of fraudsters into the banks’ database.
Pundits believe that staff of banks also colluded with these fraudsters to release sensitive information with which they use in perpetrating their heinous crimes.
They agreed that some bank workers partake in this racket by selling sensitive information of customers to these fraudsters for a fee.
Other experts however believe that while few of the fraudsters have insider links in the banks, a majority of them rely mainly on information gotten from people’s mobile phones, especially, stolen ones, or from websites in which bank customers may have done one transaction or the other, thereby revealing certain sensitive information that could be useful for fraudsters to execute their agenda.
According to the Nigeria Inter Bank Settlement System (NIBSS) social engineering is still a preferred and successful technique employed by fraudsters, as a total of 11,589 cases were reportedly carried out using various social engineering techniques, resulting in N42.755 billion fraud loss value for Q3, 2020.
NIBSS said that this represented 68 percent of the entire fraud volume and value for Q3, 2020.
Gentechnews gathered that the fraudsters also trick Nigerians by pretending to be staff of a bank to give out winning bonuses, loans and ask for some details that will give them access to customers’ bank account; once they succeed in getting the information; they withdraw almost all the funds in the account.
Finding also revealed that fraudsters now call bank customers and read their bank verification number (BVN), their full names and date of birth, making them to believe that they are being called from their banks and give out other sensitive information such as the two-factor authentication code that allows a successful diversion of the customer’s fund.
Many Nigerians have been defrauded this way and there has not been anyone who takes responsibility for the funds that have been stolen as the banks always argue that the customer would have compromised his or her bank details for the fraud to have been successfully carried out.
The customers on their part also accuse the banks of leaking out information or collaborating with the fraudsters.
Fraudsters also leveraged on social media to handle messages via WhatsApp, text as well as cloned websites to use the Federal Government intervention programme to swindle their victims by telling people to fill a form to be a recipient of some of the funds being disbursed.
Attempted fraud value, according to data from NIBSS, rose by 44 per cent in the third quarter of 2020 compared to Q3 2019, while actual loss value for Q3 2020 rose by 500 percent compared to Q3 2019.
NIBSS disclosed that in Q3, 2019, there was 10,692 attempted fraud cases with a value of N1.09 billion while actual loss was N552 million, adding that the figure, however, rose to 16,988 attempted fraud cases with a value of N3.5 billion of which actual loss to fraudsters was N3.35 billion.
Osita Nwanisobi, director of corporate communications of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), said that most bank customers in one way or the other compromise their data, while noting that there have been a few cases of bad eggs within the system that collaborate with the fraudsters.
Nwanisobi explained that most individuals store their bank details such as account number and bank name as well as BVN on their phone which can be easily accessible by anyone who has access to the phone, even through SIM cards.
