The Nigerian Deposit Insurance Corporation (NDIC) has disclosed that temporary staff members in banks are responsible for 64 per cent of fraud and forgeries committed annually.
Managing Director/Chief Executive, NDIC, Alhaji Umaru Ibrahim made this revelation while speaking during a seminar for business editors and financial journalists in Ilorin, Kwara state.
He said “A total of 10,612 of such cases were reported in 2014 as against 3,786 cases in 2013, which showed an increase of 183 per cent. The amount involved in 2013 was N21.80 billion as against N25.61 billion in 2014, which was a 17.5 per cent increase with expected/actual loss increase from N5.76 billion in 2013 to N6.19 billion in 2014.
“It was also discovered that temporary staff, clerks and tellers accounted for 64 per cent of the frauds and forgeries in 2014, which required urgent attention to improve the electronic payment controls, IT Security, human capital and integrity profiling as well as motivation of staff.”
He further explained that Section 35 and 36 of the NDIC Act, 2006 had mandated all deposit-taking financial institutions to send returns on frauds, forgeries and other financial malpractices to the corporation on monthly basis.
An official of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), Mr. Ibrahim Shazali also added that Point of Sales (PoS), ATMs and mobile banking as the major avenues where the cybercrimes were being committed.
He estimated that the value of fraudulent transactions was less than one per cent of the total transactions.
He said “This should not, however, lead to premature sighs of relief as the success rate of attempted fraudulent transactions rose from a mere three per cent to 80 per cent in the space of just one year.”