BANGKO Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) Governor Benjamin E. Diokno warned last Monday of the proliferation of complaints from victims of hackers and scammers amid the growing number of clients availing of online transactions.
Appearing before the Senate Committee on Banks chaired by Sen. Grace L. Poe, Diokno disclosed that from 2020 until 2021, the BSP received 42,456 complaints filed before its Consumer Empowerment Group.
The central bank governor recalled that the amount of questionable financial transactions ballooned up to P2 billion in 2021.
For instance, Diokno cited complaints involving “unauthorized fund transfers” and ballooning amortization from a bank borrower.
According to the BSP chief, most of the complaints were considered “closed” but assured these went through a long process and that most of the decisions were not in favor of the complaining financial consumers.
Diokno added that in the same period, the Insurance Commission received 2,992 complaints against insurance and pre-need companies and Health Maintenance Organizations (HMOs). He noted hundreds more complaints from victims of investment scams since 2019 were received by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
Based on monitoring by the BSP, he noted the top three cybercrimes listed by probers were: account take-over or identity theft; phishing and social engineering schemes; and, “card-not-present fraud” or transaction perpetrated by a scammer even without the victim’s credit card.
Moreover, he recalled that beginning 2019, fraud cases ballooned to 2,324 percent in 2020 while hacking and malware attacks went up to 302 percent in 2020, including phishing and social engineering schemes.
In the same period, identity theft also rose by 2.5 percent, prompting Diokno to affirm support for the Senators’ efforts to consider tougher penalties against identity theft as card-not-present-fraud cases also rose by 26.8 percent.
Due to this development, the BSP Governor affirmed support for remedial legislation under consideration in the senate for a financial transaction protection bill.