A R300m card fraud hit on Standard Bank in Japan is an incident of transnational organised crime that was well planned and executed.
South Africa’s Standard Bank has confirmed that it is the latest bank to be hacked into, admitting that it had credit card data stolen and used in an elaborate scheme carried out in Japan.
Standard Bank said the crime “involved the withdrawal of cash using a small number of fictitious cards at various ATMs in Japan”. The bank reported no financial losses for customers.
The Japan News website reported on Monday that more than 100 people using forged credit cards withdrew ¥1.44bn (about R200m) from 1 400 ATMs in Tokyo in under three hours.
Standard Bank described the heist as “a sophisticated, coordinated fraud incident.”
This is the latest in a series of incidents where bank cyber security measures have been insufficient to thwart hackers. Recall that just a few months ago $100 million was stolen from the Bangladesh central bank via the New York Fed, and just recently hackers stole another $12 million by rerouting “secure” global payment system transactions of Banco del Austro, an Ecuadorean bank.
Police in Japan are still investigating the fraud