Mactan, Cebu—Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas Governor Felipe M. Medalla said he is “glad” that the incident involving the GCash payment system by G-Xchange Inc. was not due to hacking but phishing, or fooling a person to reveal his password or any sensitive details about the account.
“It turns out in this particular case, it is phishing. For some reason, they (scammers) were able to convince the person to give their OTP (one time password), despite all the warnings na never share the OTP,” Medalla said at the sidelines of a news conference on the “Financial Stability Board-Regional Consultative Group for Asia” workshop and meeting.
The BSP Governor said a large part of the money were still lodged at the two bank accounts when the scammers were caught by G-Xchange executives.
Officials of the wholly-owned subsidiary of Globe Fintech Innovations Inc. announced the firm was able to restore 80 percent of the about P37 million carted away by the scammers last week.
“Fortunately, [the firm] is fast; they traced the two bank accounts where most of the stolen money were lodged. In fact the two banks told me that they have restored the money to [the] GCash [accounts],” Medalla said. If the authorities were able to trace the owners of the two accounts, they may be held criminally liable even if they just “lend” those accounts to the scammers.
“Of course it is better if it did not happen at all. But our source of comfort is that it is not hacking. The scammers will use your own greed,” the BSP chief said.
Medalla said even if the country’s digital banking is secure, it wouldn’t matter if the account holder is sharing his OTP.
“The last level of protection is the OTP. So, in other words, the only way that (access to one’s personal account) will happen if there’s somebody talking to you on the other side (for you to share your OTP) and that’s very convincing,” he said.
Phishing is an online scam where hackers inveigle individuals into giving them sensitive data. Scammers also create fake websites that closely resemble the real site that many users fail to recognize.
With the latest GCash incident, one issue that investigators are looking into is the proliferation of gambling applications not endorsed by the Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corp.
These apps are usually endorsed by social media influencers.
Medalla said things like the GCash incident will happen as bank deposits are now closer to money than ever before.
“Clearly, private money will be more and more closer substitutes for sovereign money. In that sense, it’s bad because then the edge of the centralized central bank will be reduced, especially at the time when we think that reserve requirements are too high should be reduced,” the central bank governor said.
Image credits: Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas
