KUALA LUMPUR – The Finance Ministry (MoF) and banking institutions must reveal detailed statistics on bank scam complaints, parties at fault and compensation paid, to prove that rules on banks’ responsibilities are working, a lawmaker said.
Stampin MP Chong Chieng Jen said this will show that policies making banks responsible for customers’ losses due to scams are effective, because there are still victims of financial fraud who have yet to be compensated.
“Despite such policies or regulations of MoF, they are not practised by the banks.
“There is no way a victim of a bank scam who is a layman can ever prove the ‘system weakness’ of a bank, and no bank will ever admit that there is some weakness in its system that leads to the scam. When the negligence is (by) the victims, the banks will never pay any compensation,” he said in a statement.
The DAP lawmaker said he had confronted deputy finance minister Lim Hui Ying on these matters, but received no reply. Lim is also from DAP.
Chong was responding to Lim’s reply in the Dewan Rakyat earlier today that banks are to bear responsibility for fraud victims’ losses and compensate them, including in cases where customers’ own negligence or carelessness may be involved.
Where an account holder’s own carelessness resulted in the customer getting scammed, banks must investigate and decide on a reasonable amount of compensation. Where a weakness in the banking system enabled the scam, the bank must bear responsibility, Lim had said, citing current rules.
However, Chong said he knew of ten complaints that he had forwarded to the MoF in January last year, none of which have not been resolved and no compensation paid.
The victims in these ten cases had their money withdrawn from their accounts, without their knowledge and authorisation, but were refused compensation by the banks involved.
Since these cases still had no resolution, Chong said he had requested Lim for statistics on bank scam complaints lodged in the past two years, and how many of them were due to banks’ system weaknesses and victims negligence.
“How many bank scams complaints were made? How many of them were due to the banks’ ‘system weakness’? How many of them were due to negligence of the victims? How many of the victims have been paid compensation?
“I have also requested for a breakdown of each individual bank in the statistics.
“I urge the deputy finance minister to apply the regulations which she has just mentioned in Parliament and test it on the ten cases that I now re-submit to her again for resolution,” Chong said.
Lim earlier told the Dewan Rakyat that from 2020 until the middle of last year, there were 18,238 financial fraud cases reported, of which 11% were brought to the Ombudsman for Financial Service (OFS) for further investigation. – July 9, 2024
