SHAH ALAM – The Federation of Malaysian Consumers Association (Fomca) has received over 30 complaints of unauthorised monetary withdrawals from bank accounts over the past two months.
Its National Consumer Complaints Centre senior manager Baskaran Sithamparam said incidences of monies being siphoned without the use of a Transaction Activation Code (TAC) have only surfaced recently.
"Prior to this, most of such cases involves scammers asking victims to furnish their TAC and OTP (One Time Password), but over the past two months, cases unauthorised withdrawals have increased,” said Baskaran.
Based on the complaints he received, it was ascertained that such cases were due to weak security system employed by financial institutions.
Baskaran added that even sensitive data such as users’ information can be easily stolen by unscrupulous hackers.
"How can these hackers obtain our banking information which is supposed to be safeguarded by the Personal Data Protection Act 2010 (PDPA).
"In other words, users’ data are not protected because they can be easily obtained,” said Baskaran, who urged banks to tighten their security measures.
Banking institutions, he added, must take a preemptive approach in preventing hackers from stealing users’ data.
"They should invest more in fortifying their cyber security systems,” he said.