ANTI-SCAM MEASURES IN PLACE, BUT CUSTOMER VIGILANCE MOST IMPORTANT
Despite the numerous media reports and police advisories, people still fall prey to scams because scammers are “organised criminals”, suggested OCBC’s head of group legal and regulatory compliance, Ms Loretta Yuen, during the media briefing last Friday.
“They are highly sophisticated. And the one thing that I’ve learned is that they’ve got a very, very strong skill set. And this skill set they have is how to hack the human brain. They do this very well.”
Ms Yuen added that most people have cognitive bias, believing a scam won’t happen to them. But she reinforced that “scams hit everyone … not just the old or the uneducated”.
“We are thinking how do we lift this red mist off the eyes of our customer? How do we break the spell? We are talking to experts (in) behaviour and we’re also looking at our banking process to see at which point (we can) do what we call a disruption or just-in-time disruption,” she said.
As part of OCBC’s anti-scam measures, Ms Yuen highlighted the emergency kill switch that was introduced in February this year for customers to “suspend their accounts quickly if they suspect their bank accounts have been compromised”.
The switch can be found at OCBC ATMs, in the OCBC digital app, or activated by pressing option “8” via the bank’s official contact number.
To date, the switch has helped an average of 27 customers a month to prevent…
