How To Secure your Bank Accounts from Fraudsters & Hackers

Fraudsters are always looking for prey to feed on, especially those who have little or no knowledge about how to protect and secure their bank accounts. These scammers devise so many means to scam and play tricks on bank users. Whichever bank you are operating with, here are tips to safe guide your bank details from hackers.

Your security is paramount and it also involves you protecting your banking details from your own end while bank management does theirs too. So this article is addressing ways in which these hackers penetrate to get information from bank users, which enable them proceed to dupe or steal people’s money, and ways to avoid such traps set by these set of hackers.

How Bank Fraudsters and Scammers Operate 

These are some of the ways in which these set of hackers tries to get information from bank users, in order to use those details against them. Take note of them and try as much as possible to detect fake person trying to do such. Below are the ways or method of their approach;

Through Phone Call Conversation

This has to do with bank scammers making phone calls and at same time recording the phone conversation, trying to convince a bank customer to reveal her account details; which include BVN, account number, ATM debit card numbers, date of birth, mother’s maiden name, etc.

So many bank users has been preyed through this call recording, as the fraudsters pretend to work for the banks when they are scammers with the intention to do away with your money. So as a customer to any bank in Nigeria or in other countries, you need to remain vigilant at all times.

Below are some important points to note from phone recording by bank fraudsters and how to avoid being scammed by these set of person. You have a role to play in protecting your own bank account and so ensure you are on the safer side. These descriptions below applies to banks in Nigeria and other foreign online banking firms. Before then, lets look at the list of banks in Nigeria that these information applies to;

Banks to Apply the Security Measures 

• Access Bank Plc
• Fidelity Bank Plc
• First City Monument Bank Limited
• First Bank of Nigeria Limited
• Guaranty Trust Bank Plc
• Union Bank of Nigeria Plc
• United Bank for Africa Plc
• Zenith Bank Plc
• Citibank Nigeria Limited
• Ecobank Nigeria Plc
• Heritage Banking Company Limited
• Keystone Bank Limited
• Polaris Bank Limited. The successor to Skye Bank Plc.
• Stanbic IBTC Bank Plc
• Standard Chartered
• Sterling Bank Plc
• Titan Trust Bank Limited
• Unity Bank Plc
• Wema Bank Plc
• Globus Bank Limited
• SunTrust Bank Nigeria Limited
• Providus Bank Limited
• Jaiz Bank Plc
• TAJBank Limited
• Mutual Trust Microfinance Bank
• Coronation Merchant Bank
• FBNQuest Merchant Bank
• FSDH Merchant Bank
• Rand Merchant Bank
• Nova Merchant Bank

See Also: Mobile USSD Transfer Codes For All Banks In Nigeria

Protect your Bank Account through these Security Measures 

1. Avoid fake Bank call and Email Message

Note: A call or email from any Bank will address you by your full name (as captured in your account opening documents). And not the other way round, so beware when the call you to ask for such information about your bank account.

2. Use Official Online Banking Websites

Always access your Online banking only through the official website of your bank and not through any other link (especially those sent via email from scammers).

3. Avoid suspicious texts, emails and popup windows 

Do not open suspicious texts, popup windows or emails sent to you either on your mobile phone or on PC gadgets. Most times, these hackers uses malicious virus and codes  for stealing your bank details. So avoid such for the safety of your money in the bank

4. Secure and Protect bank one-time PINs (OTP)

Giving away bank one-time PINs (OTP) and token information is very risky and can be likened to giving your house keys, or even your Debit card and the PIN number to total strangers. You simply wouldn’t do these things. So don’t give out your tokens and OTP to any person, those are meant for your own personal use only.

5. Secure Bank registered phone numbers and Emails

As long as I know, Banks in Nigeria protects their customers by sending OTPs only to their registered phone numbers and sends emails whenever an account is logged into from a device. So this calls for protecting the messages you receive on the number you used in opening any bank account, as well as the email used.

6. Use Mobile banking Apps

Mobile banking App is by far the safest way to transact, with less inherent risk than using online services on shared computers, or cards at merchants you don’t know and certainly lower than the risk of  having your signature forged on a cheque. So always use bank mobile app for your transaction for security measures. You can access and download bank mobile app for different banks in Nigeria by going to Google play store for Android users and iOS store for iphone and ipad users.

Note: the bank Mobile app cannot be registered or installed on more than one device at the same time.

7. Bank’s Enterprise Fraud Management software 

Most Bank’s Enterprise Fraud Management software runs complex scanning of customer transactions to pick up on any suspicious trends and eliminate fraud at the source. So you are still encouraged to use bank mobile apps.

8. Always Seek Assistance from your Bank contact centre

If you are ever in doubt over the authenticity of a call or email claiming to be from your Bank, hang up the call immediately and seek assistance from your bank 24 x 7 contact centre where the agents will be able to help you in a safe and fully authenticated manner.

So endeavor to get the official numbers from your bank customer care whenever you visit any of their branch. As this will help you when you want to enquire any information from them, especially when a fraudster want to rip out information from you. You can call the numbers and confirm whether the previous call was fake or legit.

Wrapping 

To report any scam or for more information on measures to protect your bank account from hackers and fraudsters, then kindly visit any of the bank branch you opened your account with. As they will guide you through and tutor you on other ways to avoid scam alert on your bank account.

But be rest assured that when you apply all the tips provided above, your bank account will be safer and strong for any hacker to penetrate through. Hope you got values? Now share this post to families and friends so that they won’t fall victim for scammers.

FAQs on How To Secure your Bank Accounts

Reference

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_banks_in_Nigeria