Bank official says carelessness of customers abet bank frauds

At least 70 percent of the bank fraud cases reported in the Kingdom are on account of negligence on the part of the customers themselves, a top bank official has revealed.
“Customer information and personal data are salable commodities in the market, and anyone can obtain it for as little an amount as $ 500,” Talat Hafez, secretary general of the Media and Banking Awareness Committee of Saudi banks, said at a meeting organized in Riyadh to launch the fifth phase of the awareness campaign against financial and banking frauds. The focus of the campaign is on the need for customers to guard themselves against fraud and the need to prevent the misuse of personal data.
Hafez said no one has immunity from financial fraud and it encompassed all classes of society and the business community without exception. “Shopping centers and malls are the favorite haunts of fraudsters,” he said, adding that Saudi banks monitor unusual patterns seen in credit card holders’ usage. As part of the campaign, display screens in aircraft would also be used to spread awareness.
The official admitted that bank employees carry an equally important responsibility in ensuring that personal information of customers is not leaked out. “There is no place in a bank for a person who violates customers’ privacy and personal data,” he said.
Because of the strict security procedures in place to tackle fraudulent transactions, he said it takes about three months to redress grievances of customers who fall prey to such tricksters, Hafez said, adding that the use of the electronic banking system is on the rise, with as much as 60 percent of total transactions carried out electronically. Claiming that the incidence of financial and bank fraud had witnessed a downtrend recently, he said this was despite the increasingly heavy traffic of electronic financial transactions and use of credit cards. In the coming days, Saudi banks would also be launching prepaid services for credit card users, which would be linked to an electronic account.
He maintained that the incidence of financial fraud in the Kingdom including theft of credit cards, pin numbers and personal data, was considerably low when compared to the international level.