In January this year, Choo tried to make an online purchase with her supplementary card, but it was declined.
When she called DBS to find out why, she was told that she had exceeded the credit limit.
"To my horror, I learnt that a total of SEVEN consecutive transactions were charged to my card, each amounting to approximately S$1,400. The total damage was S$10,150."
According to the bank, these transactions were made with a OTP (one-time password), meaning that they were secure. Because of this, the bank said that it was unable to refund the money.
"But guess what? I did NOT receive any OTP for these seven transactions at all.
The bank claimed I could have keyed in the OTP by mistake. But seven times?! Did the bank seriously think I would be tricked into giving the OTP to a stranger seven times?
Long story short, we are liable for the charges."
The above is reported in mothership.sg. In this case it was obvious that a fraud was committed 7 to 10 times. The card owner claimed innocence. DBS also claimed innocence. Card owner has to pay.
Who shall be liable? How dangerous can electronic banking and credit card transactions be?
It is so scary.
What kind of safeguards must be put in place to protect customers? $10,000 is nothing to a bank but could be all that a customer has.
Who should be investigating the fraud? Would the bank be investigating after denying responsibility and liability?
PS. I have cut down all my credit cards limit. Even ATM card limit also slashed for security reasons.
4 comments:
On a separate note, this leads me to talk about a video on Youtube on the USA pension fund conundrum, a situation where pension funds have basically been defrauded by being lured to investing in risky Hedge Funds over many years, such that retirees now face the possibility of such pension funds going bankrupt and they may get nothing back. The State Governments have also been accused of dipping their dirty hands into the cookie jar to fund projects but never been repaid. It is a crisis about to explode within a couple of years.
The problem has never been highlighted on MSM, with the news all about warmongering postures, creating friction among nations, claims of human rights abuses, China's rise and it's fabricated threats to those thousands of miles away on the other side of the world. The distraction are all to steer the issusd festering inside the USA itself. The coming debt ceiling, the derivatives time bomb, the pension fund fiasco, the racial problems have all been push aside to concentrate on warmongering.
This should be classified as fraud and police case. A report to the police must be made by the victim.
DBS cannot claim innocence. It is partially to be blamed because the easily hacked externally and easily manipulated internally electronic system belongs to DBS.
In this case, I strongly suspect that the seven illegal transactions were internal jobs, probably committed by an ex-staff of DBS Group who has been fired and went back to his country of origin already. Therefore, this is a crime that DBS must help to investigate. It cannot wash off its hands.
It may not be an isolated case but the tip of the iceberg.
P/S:
1. Whenever you receive a phone call from an unknown electronic voice recording saying that it is from DBS, and asking you to press number 3 on your phone. Hang up. Do not respond. That is the trick for the call to change your phone number in the bank's record. If you stupidly followed the instruction, the caller can replace your electronic banking phone number in the bank records to a new number of his/her choice.
2. To protect yourself, best of all, never trust electronic banking. It is never secure, never can be and never will be.
It is charged to her credit card. It is money she does not have. If she has a higher credit limit, wonder how much more she will have to pay. Sometimes supplementary cards can be difficult to control. Scary.
It is a joke that the scammers can continue to scam people for so long when technology can easily trace them and arrest them. This is looking like computer virus, no real intent to arrest them and kill the whole cheating game.
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