Bank of Baroda net banking fraud: What should you do to keep your account secure?
An unprecedented fraud committed during the registration of Bank of Baroda’s net banking app ‘bob World’ has come to the fore. One media report suggested that the bank accounts of a number of customers — in a clear breach of rules — were linked to the mobile numbers of strangers.
In the light of this fraud, RBI has prevented Bank of Baroda from the onboarding of new customers on its app.
In some cases, these strangers withdrew money from the bank accounts of the gullible customers in an act of fraud carried out in collusion with the bank employees.
The problem allegedly kicked off in March 2022 when the top management of the state lender started to pressurise regional branches for increasing the registration of ‘bob World’ customers.
The pressure was apparently so intense that the staff sometimes used their own mobile numbers to link the bank accounts of customers in order to increase the downloads of ‘bob World’. After having received the OTP on the mobile numbers of staff, the app registrations could be completed, and the number of downloads rose.
In some cases, these mobile numbers belonged to the agents of the bank known as business correspondents (BCs) who operate in the remote areas.
There were instances wherein the registrations were done solely to increase the downloads. And once these downloads were completed, these accounts were deregistered soon after and the same numbers were used again for linking other customers’ accounts.
An incident was reported where one nodal officer from the regional office – when reported about this – offered his as well as his wife’s mobile number to link to the customer’s bank accounts.
A media investigation has revealed that one recently-retired employee flagged these concerns by
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