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In this age of cyber crime, the introduction of many online transactions by many institutions should come with proper education and necessary guidelines to forestall disaster.
In our previous edition we carried an article in which a pensioner lost his entire $26 000 pension to suspected cyber criminals.
Apparently the man received a message on his phone that allegedly was from his bank, with a phone call that followed later also claiming the same and asking for his account details.
It was after he gave away the account details over the phone that his money was withdrawn from his account and all he saw were messages of the withdrawals. We believe all institutions whose operations involve some online component need to adequately arm their clients on how they should handle their information.
Of course, banks will say that they issue regular statements concerning cyber crime but the issue is that if one receives a call from their bank, they are likely to pay attention, especially if what the person on the line says tallies with one’s account details. We believe this is where the criminal elements gain the clients’ trust in that the client then assumes the person could only be from the bank since they would not have shared the information with anyone else.
It is worrying how the gangs get hold of information on people’s accounts such as the pensioner that had just got his pension lump sum.
Clearly some of the safeguards between the pension payment right through to the transfer into the bank and the subsequent suspicious withdrawal seem to suggest that there was an information leak that was enough for whoever planned the crime to convince the poor pensioner to part with his account information.
And not only did the criminals delay the victim from reporting the crime, they also pulled him out of the bank by claiming that they were fixing the mistake they had made on his account.
This is as scary as it is shocking and surely needs deeper investigation. It is also our hope that our police force is capacitated to handle such cases since technology is ever changing and advancing daily.
So much business is now being conducted online, and this exposes many people to these kinds of criminals. We have had gangs that clone cards, now these criminals on the loose emptying people’s accounts.
With the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe now releasing notes into the system, bank trips will soon be a common thing. It is our hope that our law enforcement in conjunction with the financial institutions have a system of anticipating possible trouble areas so that we minimise the risk to our people.
We urge the public never to trust phone requests for personal banking information and never to give their personal identification number to anyone, not even a bank official.
We pray that the cyber criminals are arrested to re-assure the public that is still in shock over how easily one could lose their lifetime savings.
Online Reporter