5 Alarming ways to secure your bank account conveys Mr. Zameer Nathani, Advocate – Bombay High Court and Ex-Professor on Banking Laws
Numerous security infringements reports in online transactions include the ATM / Credit card unauthorized use, extracting card particulars over a call, or hacking UPI attributes to complete another payment. In these times, most individuals are worried about ensuring the dealings as they use hundreds of apps to complete the payment.
Our team at Prittle Prattle News discovered that online transactions at least need IT skills, but offline misconduct or security infringements don’t need many talents; the intent is enough.
A few days previously, one acquaintance notified that one of his clients knew his available balance in the bank. After hearing about his problem, we considered scrutinizing it for security infringements. It turns out it’s too effortless for a banker to communicate the account balance of their customer with their other customer. So if you are a consumer of ABC Bank in Dadar Branch and a random individual is a customer of ABC Bank in Churchgate branch who solely knows your account details, he could fetch your account balance as he is friends with an administrator in that bank. So anyone who desires to understand your account balance from your phone should unlock your phone and open your banking app with a PIN code. But in the bank, the same someone can discover it without having any PIN code. Isn’t it a more threatening globe?
An industrialist expressed his suspicions; he constantly gets a call from the local extortion representative asking for sponsorship for celebrations or local sports instantly after a client payment is received. He described that sometimes they know the precise figure of the amount received. It’s a complicated nation we live in, he says.
According to Mr. Zameer Nathani, Advocate – Bombay High Court and Ex-Professor on Banking Laws, “Offline Banking matters that give advancement to fraud are the checks and balance gap. For instance, when the Nirav Modi fraud occurred, it was done by an officer who did include the authority to sanction the limits for foreign dealings. He was in the Fort Branch of the Bank for several years despite its guideline by which the person should have transferred a long time back to another branch.
Mr. Zameer openly argues that the justification that provided how the bank officer in the Nirav Modi case could sanction the amount for the foreign transaction was his access to the swift code. The massive defrauding transactions went disregarded to the stretch of Rs. Fourteen thousand crores. Secondly, despite its policy, the reasoning that provided for the non-transfer of the bank officer in the Nirav Modi case was that the person had great connections in the branch with clients. Therefore, it was impressed the bank management not to transfer him.”
Mr. Nathani also adds, “If the transactions in the Nirav Modi fraud case had been done using the technology of “Blockchain,” then the bank officer would have been caught during the offline transaction. It could have easily caught it using AI, Blockchain, and IT processes and systems to alert against the scam. Therefore, in offline banking, there is a risk of physical documents, physical authorization, and loss of checks and balances by technological monitoring if a group of bank officers has perpetrated the fraud by defrauding the bank in offline transactions.”
Alarming ways to secure your bank account from your offline bank officers to move against security infringements:
Write a letter to the branch and demand security to the secrecy of your account details
- cc the same letter to the Bank and RBI, asking execution assistance of the confidentiality to be maintained
- Ask for a notification from the bank if anyone else asks about the account balance or any other details.
- A security shield on the bank account where no one else can access the account number without the customer’s consent
- Never share account details; let it be Account Number or IFSC Code if it isn’t necessary.
- Ironically many bank officers preferred not to comment on this story when asked for a statement. It took a while for us to pull ourselves together. While making a few calls, we realized this is a standard practice for bankers to be friends with frequent customers.