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By Lukman Olabiyi
The Nigeria Deposit Insurance Corporation (NDIC) has revealed that banks in the country lost over N5 billion to fraudsters
within the first nine months of 2020.
NDIC’s executive director, Corporate Services, Mrs Omotola Abiola-Edewor, disclosed this yesterday, while delivering a keynote address, at an annual, capacity building programme for law enforcement agencies.
The programme with theme: “Effective investigation and prosecution of banking malpractices that led to the failure of banks in Nigeria” was held in Lagos.
Mrs Abiola-Edewor, who was represented at the occassion by Joshua James Etopidiok, said the figures of what banks lost to fraudsters last year within nine months , was contained in a report recently released by the Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System Plc (NIBSS).
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She said NIBSS’s report, specifically disclosed that between January and September, 2020, all the banks in the country lost over N5billion to fraudsters.
She also stated that NDIC, in its annual report of 2019, highlighted a total of 52,754 fraud cases as against 37,817 in 2018 and 26,182 in 2017.
The NDIC director said the amount involved in the fraud cases stood at N204.65 billion, in 2019, compared to N38.93billion in 2018 and N12.01 billion in 2017, adding that total actual loss declined from N15.15billion in 2018 to N5.46billin in 2019.
She also held that the fraud incidences could be attributed to the increasing sophistication of fraud related techniques, such as hacking, cybercrime as well as increase in Information Technology related products and usage, fraudulent withdrawals and unauthorised credit.
“The channels and instruments through which the reported frauds and forgeries were perpetrated indicated that ATM/Card- related fraud had the highest frequency, accounting for 49.78 percent of fraud cases followed by web-based internet banking frauds with 21.02 percent, although the value of losses was higher in web-based internet banking frauds against ATM card-related fraud”, she said.
