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