“As banks are increasing online presence, customers have become more susceptible to cyber crime,” M Palanisami, banking ombudsman for Karnataka said. Speaking to Express, he pointed out that ‘net banking’ related crimes are on the rise. He shared that many new generation private banks were offering net banking without fire wall protection.
“These days lot of mails are orginating seeking personal information such as account number and Personal Identification Number (PIN) and many customers are falling prey to this,” he said and added that some of these ‘duped’ customers were highly educated and some of them were even IT professionals.
Taking the opportunity to enlighten the people, he said that no bank would seek information over the internet and no sensitive information should be shared online. Citing that the Real Time Graft System (RTGS) was one such fool-proof system used by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), he informed that this system had never even been attacked.
When asked why this system was not a standard practice amongst all financial institutions in the country, he clarified that the RBI cannot get into ‘micro management’ to place such systems in all banks operating net banks.
Palanisamy said, “The banks have to ensure that customers are not vulnerable to such frauds.” He also said that the number of complaints related to banking was on the rise and there was an average of 7 complaints per month.