ATM Ombudsman Commences Operation This Year

Automated Teller Machines (ATM) fraud has become commonplace in Nigeria and the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has moved swiftly to curb the menace with the setting up of an Ombudsman that will handle ATM related frauds in the country, Nigeria CommunicationsWeek has learnt.
The Ombudsman will commence operation this year and will take over ATM related fraud cases now being handled by law courts and resolve them accordingly.
Abayomi Atoloye, acting director, Banking Payments Systems Department, Central Bank of Nigeria, said that the new body, can only takeover such cases when it is not resolved after 14 days.
“We are proposing the establishment of an Ombudsman that will resolve issues not settled within 14 days,” Atoloye said.
ATM fraud include explosive attacks, card data compromise, skimming, cash trapping, software hacking, note substation, transaction reversal among others.
ATM and other financial frauds needed to be effectively tackled as they were causing financial institutions a lot of challenges including higher operational cost, higher credit and bad debt losses and lower revenues.
Nigeria CommunicationsWeek gathered that there are presently about 28 million Nigerians using the cards at over 9,400 ATM machines across the country.
There were close to 91 million transactions on the machines last month according figures released by the major switching company.
The storage mode of the cards made them easy to be cloned, hence, fraudulent transactions, to a large extent, had forced banks in developed countries to adopt new Chip and Pin cards, which are more secured.