The Central Bank of Nigeria, some
commercial banks and commercial banks and Information Technology
security firms, including Winigroup Limited, are currently exploring
ways to jointly curb the menace of e-payment fraud
The Director, Banking and Payments
System, CBN, Mr. DipoFatokun, said the CBN, along with relevant
stakeholders, was exploring ways to establish an industry security
operation centre and a risk information centre to consolidate its
strength at reducing e-payments fraud to the barest minimum and
enhancing trust in payment system.
He spoke at a total fraud protection
forum organised in Lagos by Winigroup and Easy Solutions to sensitise
the banking industry to the latest threats from hackers and electronic
fraudsters.
He said WiniGroup had been a partner in the journey towards combating e-fraud and secure e-payments ecosystem.
A former deputy governor, Central Bank
of Nigeria, Mr. TundeLemo, also at the event said for Nigeria’s
electronic payment system to be secure from activities of
cybercriminals, banks need to create a safe environment.
Lemo said, “They should also create a brand and fraud intelligence, safe browsing and device analytics,” he said.
He said, “I recall that fraud incidence
on magnetic stripe was as much as 90 per cent until we introduced chip
and pin. We can only fight fraud if we work together. Unless we have a
forum for cross-fertilisation of ideas; we may not know what the other
guys are doing.”
He urged the CBN to quickly galvanise
banks to get better technology solutions to prevent electronic frauds
and take up consumer protection.
The Director, Europe, Middle East and
Africa for Easy Solutions, Mr. Jeremy Boorer, said Nigerian banks were
up in a battle with e-fraudsters who were daily devising new strategies
to steal financial information and money from bank accounts.
He called on the banks to deploy mobile
fraud prevention, transaction risk monitoring, fraud intelligence, cloud
and email authentication, safe browsing and clientless malware
detection in their electronic channels.
Boorer said banks needed to take
proactive mitigation measures for account takeover, Internet scams and
malicious activities against their brands.
“Banks also need to have proactive
malware detection and threat analytics on their customer devices,
real-time transaction anomaly detection and risk evaluation,
transparently deploy multi-layered security in their mobile banking
application as well as stop email spoofing with fastest path to full
DMARC application,” he added.
He also advised that they should provide
transparent malware protection for all clients with zero friction,
multi-factor authentication for web and cloud applications.
He warned about the existence of fake
apps claiming to come from banks, saying once downloaded and financial
information entered, including credit/debit cards details and personal
identity numbers, “the bank customer money is gone as the fraudster will
clone the cards or transfer monies immediately.”
The Vice Chairman, Winigroup, convener
of the anti-fraud forum, Tim Akano, said fraudsters were using Bank
Verification Number policy and other means to dupe bank customers.
Akon welcomed the CBN’s collaboration
with experts within and outside the banking industry as well as law
enforcements agencies under the Nigeria Electronic Fraud Forum to take
advantage of new ideas including the ones expressed at the forum.