By Ling Hui
KUCHING, June 16: Use credit cards instead of payment gateways for online transfers to avoid unauthorised transaction frauds which are increasingly rampant, says Sarawak United Peoples’ Party (SUPP) Public Complaints Bureau (PCB) chief Milton Foo.
He said one of the fraudsters’ tactics is to fish for personal details especially online banking account usernames and passwords through payment gateway fronts.
Where victims did not receive any notifications for OTP or TAC numbers, he opined that scammers could have hacked into handphones to divert messages to their end.
“This is what I’ve understood from the six unauthorised transaction cases that I’m currently handling (under PCB). The victims, at any one time, were directed to unknown payment gateways when they were doing online shopping.
“So, whenever you want to buy things online, use credit cards. Don’t use the FPX transfer or any payment gateway which is spending from your own savings account.
“Use credit cards because that way, you’ll be spending the banks’ money. Don’t use your own money,” he said during a press conference at SUPP headquarters here today.
Foo also suggested another alternative to reduce the risk of losing huge sums to this particular scam, which is to limit the usage of online banking.
“For example, I have two accounts in one particular bank. Most of my money I store in Account A, and I tell the bank to cancel the online banking feature for Account A.
“For online transfers, I use only Account B, where I only store limited amount of money. Maybe just a few hundreds of a few thousands. Don’t link the accounts together with online banking,” he said.
Without authorised online banking, he said, the account with most of the savings would be secure in certain ways as fraudsters would not be able to access the account remotely.
Even when or if such savings accounts are involved in such frauds, he said banks would have to take full responsibility for absolute negligence as the account holders never authorised the online banking feature.
Ever since Foo took over the PCB chief role from Kota Sentosa assemblyman Wilfred Yap on June 10, Foo said he had already received altogether six cases with victims falling for similar scam methods.
He thus urged members of the public who have fallen victim to this fraudulent scheme, no matter the amount lost, to step forward and submit their complaints. — DayakDaily
