Uganda’s commercial banks of recent years have been experiencing an increase in customers’ cash thefts, mostly through external and internal fraud schemes and collaborations.
This has made customers lose millions of their hard-earned money in most cases without compensation from the commercial banks, which include Stanbic Bank, Equity Bank, and Centenary Bank, to mention but a few.
Among the fraud crimes are identity theft, which has emerged as a bigger threat within Uganda’s banking sector, accounting for 42.4 percent of scams and related incidents reported in 2022.
According to experts, the theft of customers money is the result of weak and underpaid cyber security experts who are paid peanuts by the commercial banks.
Mugazi Mahone, an information and communication technology expert, intimated that “what happens is that most ICT companies are owned by non-IT experts but highly connected individuals; they go ahead and hire experts who do all the donkey work as the bosses enjoy free money; as a result, this prompts the skilled and underpaid experts to use their skills to earn money, hence robbing the banks and the customers.”
The banking industry continues to face challenges of fraud in areas of e-platform payments. Bank employees are allegedly said to be part of the scheme by tipping off the hackers to people with lots of money in their bank accounts.
In February 2023, Uganda police arrested nine suspects, including two bankers, after they fraudulently accessed a client’s account and made unauthorized transfers of funds, worth USD1.8 million, into other bank accounts.
Such fraud acts have frustrated many bank customers and bank staff, who are reluctant to speak out for fear of upsetting their bosses and creating fear and panic in the customers.
The Uganda Bankers Association also highlighted mitigation measures to create fraud guard systems that are aimed at safeguarding customers money through designing a cyber security operations center to combat fraud.