Some Nigerian
banks have decided to stop the usage of their electronic cards from working in
the US, China and some few other countries.
This is as a result of rising cases of electronic frauds, especially
Automated Teller Machine-related scams, which have made Deposit Money Banks to
lose billions of naira in recent times.
It was
gathered that the banks took the action following the huge amount they were
spending in refunding customers who had lost money in payment cards related
frauds.
“A number of
banks decided to deactivate their payment cards from working in the USA, China
and a few other countries that are still using magnetic stripe instead of the
chip and PIN,” a top bank official familiar with the situation said on Sunday.
“The decision
was caused by the rising cases of fraudsters using cloned Nigerian ATM cards to
make shopping transactions malls in the USA and China,” he added.
Apart from
fraudsters using cloned payment cards issued by Nigerian banks to buy goods
abroad, it was gathered that some of the payment cards had also been used to
withdraw money from ATMs in foreign countries, especially in the US.
“This scam
has been on for a very long time but it has reduced drastically since some
banks decided to deactivate their payment cards from working overseas. However,
what we have done as a bank is to tell our customers to inform us whenever they
are travelling overseas so that we can activate their payment cards to work
overseas. Once they tell us, we will activate it,” the banker explained.
According to
the Central Bank of Nigeria statistics, banks lost N40bn to electronic frauds
in 2013 alone.
