KUALA LUMPUR, Oct 3 — Bank Negara Malaysia (BNM) has today announced a 58 per cent reduction in unauthorised online banking transactions reported to the National Scam Response Centre over the past five months.
The central bank's governor Datuk Shaik Abdul Rasheed Abdul Ghaffour said the reduction was due to the implementation of BNM’s five key measures to combat financial fraud in December 2022.
“These early signs are very encouraging, and we anticipate further reductions in the future,” he said at the launch of the #jangankenascam National Scam Awareness Campaign at the Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre here.
Abdul Rasheed said that the NSRC was launched in October 2022, and since then it has received over 19,000 reports on scam cases — which led to the freezing of more than RM60 million and the identification of 43,000 mule account holders.
He also said that a National Fraud Portal (NFP) will be launched by mid-2024 to streamline the industry’s scam response end-to-end, from initial identification and reporting to the recovery of funds.
“This platform will enhance efficiency by automating processes, enabling a more rapid response to assist victims. We envision the NFP expanding to include predictive assessments of mule accounts, advanced analytics, and fund tracing algorithms,” he said.
Abdul Rasheed added that BNM is assessing the number of additional policy enhancements on handling financial scams.
“Some have faced the loss of their entire life savings, struggling to recover financially. In light of this, the bank is actively evaluating additional policy enhancements to address financial scams.
“This includes strengthening the requirements for financial institutions to undertake a more robust investigation, stronger preventive controls and review the effectiveness of this mechanism,” he said.
The five key measures which were introduced last year are a transaction cooling-off period, migrating from short messaging service (SMS) to one-time passwords (OTP) to a more secure authentication method, a single designated device for authorisation, removal of hyperlinks from SMS and email communications, and a 24-hour cyber fraud security hotline.
