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Mumbai, Oct 19: Keeping safety of customer’s safety first, the State Bank of India and its subsidiary banks blocked cards of their customers. About 6.26 lakh debit cards of their customers have been blocked after “suspicious transactions” were spotted at ATM machines. Without informing the customers, their cards were blocked. Customers were caught unaware after their ATM cards stopped functioning at ATM centres. The bank then sent emails and SMSes to customers about the blockage and asked them to apply for new cards.
Hindustan Times quoted Shiv Kumar Bhasin, chief technology officer as saying, “About 0.25 per cent of our cards have been blocked. We came to know that some of our customers have used them at some virus-infected ATMs. These were white label ATMs operated by Hitachi payment services.” Reportedly, the card was blocked to avoid any sort of misuse. (ALSO READ: ATM card skimming racket busted in Thane, 10 arrested)
As per reports, around 5.07 lakh cards out of the 20.27 crore cards issued by SBI alone till July-end has been blocked. About 25 crore debit cards were issued including those from SBI’s subsidiary banks — State Bank of Mysore, State Bank of Hyderabad, State Bank of Bikaner and Jaipur, State Bank of Travancore and State Bank of Patiala — were blocked.
A SBI branch manager in Mumbai was quoted saying, “In the past 3-4 days, we saw some unidentified and suspicious transactions at some ATMs and hence the cards were blocked immediately. The cards have been blocked across many circles.” The step by SBI comes as a precautionary measure following cases of unknown transactions. Retired IAS officer CV Ananda Bose claimed to have lost about Rs 3 lakh from his account in the scam. (ALSO READ: Hi-tech ATM robbery in capital, many duped)
To avert any major losses, banks take precautionary measures by periodically remining customers to change their debit card person identification number (PIN) or password. Banks generally ask customers to change their PINs every month or atleast in 3 to 6 months. Banks also remind customers not to share their passwords with any other persons to avoid security breach. Skimming and cloning of cards lead to data theft thus leading to money transactions.
Recently, during investigation, forensic officials recovered a device hidden in the smoke detector on the ceilin of an ATM machine. Police later arrested three foreigners in the case. The Reserve Bank of India has asked all banks to update their cards into chip-based EMV cars that have multiple layers of security. With the chip-based card, unless the right PIN is used, information is not validated by bank servers.
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