Nearly 60 percent of fraudulent transactions involved customers voluntarily transferring money for some item or service, Bank of Maldives (BML) CEO Karl Stumke said on Monday.
"Most scams were carried out with customers transferring money to buy something they saw on the internet or on Viber. A lot of money has also been lost after phones were given to children," he said at the bank's annual general meeting.
The theft of funds through scams is on the rise everywhere in the world, he said. Information leaked after Facebook was hacked two years ago included the personal information of 80,000 Maldivian users, he revealed. This information is used by scammers.
In response to criticism directed at the bank over the loss of funds from bank accounts, Stumke said the bank remains silent in some cases because it was related to the individual rights of customers.
"The bank will take responsibility if money is lost due to the bank's negligence," he said.
BML sent more than a million text messages last year to raise awareness and alert customers to scams, he said. About 1800 advertisements were made through radio and TV and the bank made more than 1.4 million social media impressions about scam awareness, he added.
More than 232,000 transactions per day on average were made last year using internet and mobile banking. While more than two million mobile banking logins were recorded daily, more than 85 million transactions were made through internet banking last year, BML statistics showed.
