FITC Report Identifies Top 3 Most Common Fraud Threats in Nigerian Banking Sector
The Nigerian banking sector has long grappled with the challenges of financial fraud, which continues to evolve with the times.
In a recent report, the Financial Institutions Training Centre (FITC) has shed light on the top 3 most prevalent fraud threats currently facing the country’s banking industry.
The leading provider of training and advisory services to financial institutions in Nigeria identifies computer/web fraud, mobile fraud, and POS-related fraud as the top three prevalent forms of fraudulent activity in the Nigerian banking sector in the first quarter of 2024.
FITC disclosed this in its recently released ‘Report on Fraud and Forgeries Report in Nigerian Banks for Q1 2024′.
According to the report, mobile fraud had the highest ranking, accounting for N768.84 million (25.73 per cent) of the total amount, followed by Computer/Web fraud at N680.75 million (22.78 per cent), and POS Fraud which came next at (18.93 per cent).
However, the report said banks’ losses to fraud declined by 77.62 per cent to N468.42 million in the first quarter of 2024 from N2.09 billion in the last quarter of 2023
Meanwhile, 35 staff appointments were terminated in Q1 2024, significantly higher than in Q4 2023 where staff terminations were only recorded for nine cases.
FITC said, “The F&F report for Q1 2024 shows a significant decline in at least 60 per cent of the areas measured when compared to the Q4 2023 report and this is a welcome development.
“We need to understudy fraud control activities in this quarter and improve upon the same to ensure that going forward the numbers keep dropping while also implementing continuous vigilance and proactive measures.
“Banks need to ensure the application of advanced fraud detection technologies and analytics to continuously monitor transactions of suspicious patterns and anomalies.”
