•Central Bank, others should develop measures to curb menace -Financial expertsMany Nigerians have since the introduction of electronic banking suffered huge financial losses from hoodlums, who steal their phones and hack into their bank accounts. The hoodlums either transfer the victims’ hard-earned savings into another accounts or purchase recharge cards from the account to perpetrate other heinous crimes.
“I asked her to send her direct mobile number to me so that I could send the card to it. She obliged but I was advised to send anything to her because she would not come. I ran back to the welcome back centre where I was told that the hoodlums were cancelling the message to block the line. I quickly ran to the mobile telecommunication company’s office at Ikotun and succeeded in blocking the line.
It was a tale of woes for Oji, who also had a nasty experience in the hands of the miscreants. “The guys who stole my phone didn’t buy recharge cards from my account. They stole my money. I can never pity a thief again in my life because they are merciless. The pains of losing a phone, the contacts and other information in it are enormous not to talk of the thieves hacking into one’s bank accounts and stealing money from them.
Some of the victims berated mobile telephone operators and the National Communication Commission for compounding their woes when they went to retrieve their stolen lines. Where the phone is locked, the suspect said, “Locking of phones with password does not stop me from hacking into any account, as long as I can lay my hands on the SIM card. All I need to do is to remove the SIM and slot it into a small phone.
“In the 90s or early 2000, the German government were looking for two Nigerians who broke into a German bank and stole millions of Deutschmark. They placed a ransom on the hoodlums’ heads. The German government said they were not looking for the robbers to kill or send them to prison but to know how they were able to carry out the crime so that they could provide a solution to it. That is the way to go.
“Everybody wants convenience of transactions and convenience of life and in the process of looking for this, it comes with pains. The next level should be how to minimise those pains. For me, insurance is a way out. When series of questions are asked before every transaction is done, that has taken away the convenience. If the network is down, what happens? CBN should be the one to mandate banks to tell their customers to insure their transactions.