Nigerians groan as identity thieves plunge them with tears, losses

Identity fraud and Automated Teller Machine (ATM) scams have been said to be on the rise in the country targeting Nigerians, banks, e-commerce and other daily financial activities.

This new wave of cyber threats is as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic which has forced drastic changes in e-commerce and mobile banking and made malicious actors to exploit weaknesses in remote corporate networks, merchant e-commerce sites and financial institutions dealing with enormous increases in mobile banking transactions.

Identity fraudsters and Automated Teller Machine (ATM) scammers are now so rampant in banks, switching companies.

They work as an organized crime groups who are leveraging on specialist providers of cybercrime tools and services to conduct a wide range of crimes against financial institutions, including ransomware campaigns, distributed denial of service attacks, business email compromise scams and access mining.

Identity theft also known as identity fraud is the misappropriation of another person’s identifying information (birth date, address and maybe phone number, pin numbers and so on) for financial gains.

Investigations revealed that they deploy phishing scam, which is a fraudulent practice, whereby the criminals would send fraudulent SMS and email to victims directing them to fake Web sites where they are asked to input sensitive data. Phishing is a type of social engineering attack often used to steal user data, including login credentials and credit card numbers.

They also use the fraudulent practice of sending emails purporting to be from reputable companies in order to induce individuals to reveal personal information such as passwords and credit card numbers.

In the emails, the criminals had attachments that, when clicked, secretly install “spyware” that can capture personal information and send it to third parties over the Internet.

With the information supplied by victims, the criminals successfully break into the victims’ bank accounts leaving in the ends tales of woes and losses.

In other instances, they disguise themselves as bank representatives, and also use the palliatives from the government as bait to collect customers Bank Verification Numbers, (BVN) and other key banking details.

Nigerian banks have always implored their customers to be vigilant by alerting them that they have observed a worrying increase in reports of fraudsters targeting unsuspecting customers.

Executive Director, Retail Banking, Access Bank Plc, Victor Etuokwu, said that  “Access Bank is imploring its customers to be wary of any message, demanding their personal or bank details. Customers must remember that the Bank will never ask for their BVN, full card PAN, PIN, mobile app activation code, OTP or password as it is readily available to the Bank via its database.

“Any call, email and text message, claiming to be from Access Bank demanding for any of these details is certainly a scam,” Etuokwu added.

Finding has shown that the Economic and Financial Crime Commission (EFCC) has being monitoring this development, while the Commission is inviting useful information from the public that would help burst the ring of such fraudsters.