SHILLONG: The rising banking fraud is not a cause of concern for customers in big cities but here in the town it is.
Customers here said that though bank officials are unwilling to disclose such fraudulent activities happening day-in-day-out, it is a fact that frauds whether committed externally or internally by employees are on the rise.
The concern of the customers is genuine and more so since Meghalaya already has two major fraud cases – the Amlarem Branch and Main Branch case of the country’s biggest nationalized bank.
Banking frauds, as learnt, can be of the nature of misuse and illegal violation of trust, deceitful encashment through forged instruments, negligence and cash shortages, escalation of overall cost of property to obtain higher loan amount, over assessment of mortgaged properties while sanctioning, grant of loans against forged term deposits, over-invoicing of export bills resulting in concessional bank finances are some of the common forms of frauds, said bank officials.
And in order to check these, banks are increasingly depending upon the technology front by switching on to internet and mobile banking services besides setting up of more ATMs.
Informing that some of these techniques are already in place in big cities, an official of a nationalized bank from the town said that though ATM frauds are not heard or seen here but there are cases when customers complained that money from their account got fraudulently debited.
The solution to frauds committed in ATMs now lies in anti-fraud mechanism installed in ATMs in some big cities which will also be introduced here in the state. The official while denying that banking frauds is not as alarming as it is assumed to be he said, “Frauds can take place anywhere and banks have to guard themselves since the profession of a banker is increasingly looked down upon by customers.”
Customers are advised to be careful in terms of “pin compromise” and “card skimming”, which are some of the common types of ATM frauds that has unearthed, said bankers of various banks in the city. Though bank customers are apprehensive about the security aspect of modern banking services, they said that security should be holistic in nature.
It is learnt from a Shillongite, who is working in the national capital, that banks have introduced a “Fraudulent Device Inhibitor” to check on rising bank frauds. The device, he said, ensures prevention of card trapping and skimming (skimming is the pilfering of credit card information by either manually copying down numbers or using a magnetic stripe reader on a pocket sized electronic device).
The Shillongite, who is working in an IT Firm that deals in transfer control protocol, said that there is another device called ‘Jitter’ that allows a rapid stop-start movement when the user’s card is inserted or taken out of an ATM machine, which prevents information on the card’s magnetic stripe from being read by fraudulent skimming devices.
Though, sounds high it is imperative for customers to know about these practices that is rampant in the banking sector, said both customers and bankers.
