Agribank: Customers lost money possibly due to information leak at ATM

The Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (Agribank) issued a press release regarding the theft of money from a series of accounts opened at the bank overnight.Since 7:30 p.m. on April 25, many employees of a media unit in Hanoi received text messages deducting money from their accounts even though they had not made any transactions, and even had their cards locked.

Preliminary verification results from Agribank show that the customer's card's data was most likely stolen at the ATM during use.

Agribank said it has worked directly with customers who lost money to come up with a solution. Accordingly, for cardholders who had money withdrawn using fake cards at ATMs under Agribank's management, the bank plans to respond with the results.for customers on April 27. As for cases of money withdrawals using fake cards at ATMs of other credit institutions, Agribank is coordinating to collect documents and will respond to cardholders immediately after receiving the results.

"Agribank commits to fully reimburse the lost amount, if the loss is not due to the customer's fault," the bank's recommendation said.

A statement of text message transactions of a customer who lost money shows that 9 transactions were withdrawn each time with the amount of 3,003,300 VND. Share withVnExpressPreviously, many banking experts also hypothesized that criminals used fake cards to steal customer information and withdraw money at ATMs.

With multiple account holders at an agency being attacked at the same time, an expert said that it is possible that criminals used skimming to steal card information at ATMs located near this unit.

Skimming is a device like a plastic board containing a camera to steal card information, which is attached by criminals to the outside of the card slot. In this way, criminals can record all the PIN code input activities of customers when withdrawing money. When the card is inserted, it will go through the skimming device first and then into the card slot. Thanks to that, criminals will get all the information stored on the card's magnetic strip.

However, up to now, Agribank has not clarified the reason why many hours after the bank announced that it would block the customer's card, the withdrawal could still take place.

A customer said that although Agribank announced that her account had been locked since 10 p.m., she was still able to withdraw the remaining VND21 million a few hours later. Meanwhile, some of her colleagues’ accounts were still available for withdrawal until 3 a.m. on April 26.

Anh Tu