Banks form anti-fraud squads to hunt down criminals
Finance offences too big for cops to handle alone
28/04/2014
Wassayos Ngamkham
As banking-related crime continues to rise, financial institutions are realising they can no longer simply rely on the police to control increasingly sophisticated networks of criminals.
To tackle the issue, banks are taking matters into their own hands and setting up squads to assume the role of police investigators. Siam Commercial Bank is among the institutions getting involved, and has formed an “anti-fraud team” to hunt criminals.
The bank is inviting retired police to work for the team to boost its investigative powers...
... the government police claim they are already stretched to full capacity attempting to cope with increasing banking crime...
The team started out by taking stock of the various banking crimes. These range from in-house theft of personal financial data perpetrated by bank staff, to robberies at bank branches, ATM skimming rackets and hacking of online financial transactions.
...gangs are stealing people’s ATM data through a range of methods.
Some secretly install skimmers to ATM machines... attached to the slot in which customers insert their bank cards. The devices then copy the information stored in the card’s magnetic strip. Criminals are also embedding tiny cameras into ATM machines, to record customers’ pin numbers. Other gangsters opt to install fake ATM slots and keyboards on ATMs, allowing them to steal personal information regardless of whether the cardholder attempts to hide the transaction from any potential hidden camera.
It usually takes just a few hours for gangs to prey on their victims. Once they get the information they want, they transfer the skimmed data onto a blank card and use it to immediately withdraw money. Criminals do not always make the blank cards — also known as “white cards” — themselves. They often simply sell the financial information to gangsters in different countries.
Online banking is also increasingly susceptible to attacks. ...
To steal financial information from a potential victim, criminals can launch a computer virus that “sucks” important financial data from internet banking services during online transactions.
Another tactic is to fool banking customers into installing fake banking applications on their mobile phones. These apps work in the same way as viruses, lifting the vital data as the customer unwittingly uses the service...
...In the latest development, police from Crime Suppression Division yesterday arrested five Malaysian suspects for ATM skimming rackets in Hat Yai...