Banks confirm refunds to recent cyber fraud victims

After the recent cyber fraud scam that affected at least 40,000 individuals in Thailand, banks are now confirming that they will refund money to such victims. The scam saw small amounts of online withdrawals through hacking users’ debit and/or credit card information. Payong Srivanich, chairman of the Thai Bankers’ Association, says banks will pay back money to the victims of these cases within 5 business days for debit card holders. For those holding credit cards, the banks will cancel suspicious transactions while not collecting interest or fees for the transactions from cardholders. Payong also said the banks will close affected credit card accounts and open new ones for customers, all free of charge.

During Oct 1-17, the cyber fraud incident was found to compromise 10,700 cards. 5,900 of those were credit cards which totalled 100 million baht in fraudulent charges. The rest of the incident saw 4,800 debit cards compromised, totalling a transaction value of 31 million baht.

The Bank of Thailand’s assistant governor for payment systems policy and financial technology group, says the BOT and the TBA have jointly set guidelines for all banks to increase measures to prevent unauthorised withdrawals of cash debited through plastic cards. The statement also said that banks will have to increase their monitoring of suspicious transactions, including small and frequent transaction amounts.

As such small and frequent transaction amounts were how the recent cyber fraud scam succeeded, many victims say they didn’t receive a notification that such small amounts under 100 baht were being taken out of their accounts. The BOT and the TBA says they will hold talks with debit and credit card service providers to ask them to add more identity verification requirements, such as the use of One Time Password, for debit card usage with online shops.

SOURCE: Bangkok Post