Our editorial last week was on the hacking of our editor’s FB account and how troublesome and dangerous it was.
The matter came out in the discussions of a small group of five people. Everyone got animated. Each had a story to tell about their ATM bank accounts having been hacked resulting in some of their money being stolen.
One of them, a doctor, related the money he was depositing in his ATM account was being reduced by small amounts so he never noticed. How long it had been going on? He never bothered to backtrack to find out how much was filched. Of course, the bank, a big one, denied any wrongdoing. With no hard evidence is his hands as all transactions were with the ATM machine, he chose not to file a complaint. Good for him, he could comfortably absorb the financial damage.
But to protect his funds in the future, he opted to transfer his money to a “jurasic” account with a passbook.
Another fellow, a retired police officer complained about a similar event when he was most vulnerable, during the pandemic. He was keeping just about P20,000.00 in his ATM account for emergency purposes. When a friend called to borrow P10,000 just for two days, he was shocked to find out his account was empty. Angrily, he confronted the branch manager and inquired about their CCTV so the culprit could be identified. He was told, it was not working. What!!#? He could have raised hell and took the bank to court but decided it ws not worth the aggravation.
The richest of them all, a retiree from the BIR told his experience which was not so different. He put his retirement benefits in his ATM account with a another very big bank. After about a year, he felt there was something wrong going on with his account. So he painstakingly summed up all this withdrawals and found out about P40,000.00 was illegally taken from his account which he never noticed as it was done in small amounts over several years. He could have taken the bank to court but, like the others, he decided it was not worth the trouble.
One of those on the table then delivered the moral of the whole thing— for everybody to heed the real meaning of ATM—“Asawa Ti Mangwithdraw.”**