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Bank says it needs two weeks to sort ATM fraud cases

A Dubai bank has said it may take officials up to two weeks to sort out the problems associated with the ATM card fraud in the UAE.

Standard Chartered Bank said that although it is employing a special task force to deal with the issue, victims of fraudulent withdrawals may have to wait up to a fortnight before finding out whether they will be reimbursed and getting a new card.
But for one Arabian Business reader who lost more than $7,000 in last week’s ATM fraud, he has been reimbursed the money he lost.

“The head of banking operations called me this evening and apologised for this problem and for taking a week to solve it,” Lars Jeppesen, who featured in our story on Sunday, said.

“He informed me that the funds would be transferred back into my account by tomorrow midday. With this conclusion and action from the bank, I remain a happy Standard Chartered customer.”

Chris de Bruin, head of consumer banking at Standard Chartered in the UAE, said that Jeppesen was dealt with “relatively quickly” and that typically, the bank would take up to two weeks to deal with fraudulent cases.

Last week’s ATM fraud was complicated by the fact that it was perpetrated abroad.
“If people do this in the country then they are largely dealing with our systems directly, and our security measures on our direct systems are substantially better than they are once you go to remote systems,” he said.

Many markets, including the UAE, have moved to implement chip based cards in order to provide a higher level of security. But banks in many parts of the world still rely exclusively on magnetic stripes, which are more easily copied.

It is still unknown how the cards affected in last week’s fraud were cloned. “In this case it would seem that it wasn’t the negligence of customers that resulted in this but some other systemic problem,” de Bruin said.

“Our focus at the moment is clearly on ensuring that our customers aren’t compromised any more.”

Meanwhile, UAE banks are restricting international transactions to contain the large-scale card fraud by overseas gangs that surfaced last week, the UAE Gulf News reported on Monday.

"Stopping international transactions is the key to containing the damage," Saif Al-Shehi, senior general manager of retail banking at National Bank of Abu Dhabi, told the paper.

The bank initially blocked transactions in just a small number of countries, but now has extended it to most of the world, he said. Banks are making exceptions for some international transactions on an individual basis, he added.

He added that the number of international transactions being rejected is ten times more than those that are allowed, including those from point of sales.

The bank will be issuing new cards to all its customers by Oct. 1, Al-Shehi told the paper.

Emirates NBD told the paper that the bank has blocked two to three percent of transactions in 20 countries.

Visa International, one of the major two card networks, warned Barclays in August that the security of 1,469 debit and credit was compromised after the network's UAE database had been hacked, the paper said.

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