12 Apr 2023

Criminals are said to be taking advantage of  the advancement in technology to target unsuspecting members of the public.

First National Bank Botswana (FNBB)-Head of Fraud, Ms Gorata Seboko told an a workshop to enlighten law enforcement officials on available fraudulent patterns that there was a growing trend where criminals used highly sophisticated social engineering techniques in cyber space to target people.

The workshop, which was held in Gaborone recently, brought together participants from the Botswana Unified Revenue Service (BURS), Botswana Police Service (BPS), Directorate on Corruption and Economic Crime (DCEC), Directorate of Intelligence and Security (DIS), Financial Intelligence Agency (FIA) and Directorate of Public Prosecutions (DPP) among others.

Ms Seboko said the workshop, was part of the bank’s mandate to protect Batswana, by helping them to avoid being defrauded their funds, through thorough investigations and reporting on mode of operations used by perpetrators.

“It has become apparent that no one is spared when it comes to cyber fraud as both the financial and non-financial institutions are soft targets to cybercrime,” she said.
She said criminals not only targeted banks and customers for immediate financial gain, but they would target organisations and other data sources to gain access to confidential data and customer information.

Ms Seboko mentioned institution reputational damage, dented customer loyalty and shareholder confidence, as well as loss of profits amongst the myriad of problems resulting from fraud.

She said fraudsters, hackers, identity thieves and money launderers had a way to fight back banks’ robust response plans to increase resilience of their systems by innovating new ways to penetrate these processes.

Ms Seboko said as a bank they had seen a spike in ATM bombings and Cash-In-Transit robberies, adding however that FNBB appreciated government efforts to fight these criminal activities.

She said house invasions, leading to the compromise of banking platforms was yet another fraudulent behaviour they had discovered.

She said promotional scams, where customers were enticed with monetary prizes for non-existent competitions had been on the rise as well.

Ms Seboko revealed that the bank had devised consultative workshops to share insights and knowledge on bank products and services to assist law enforcement practitioners to investigate and prosecute.

She informed stakeholders that the bank was guided by the Integrated Crime Framework to identify new crime risks, manage them and escalate all matters to governance structures in the bank for discussion and action. ENDS