The allure of likes, shares, followers, views and users is universal. Bank of Baroda, the second-largest government-owned bank, is not immune to the craving. But when it couldn’t get as many bank customers to use its newly launched app as it would have liked, the bank employees in connivance with top officials came up with a fraudulent workaround.
Under pressure to show more users, Bank of Baroda employees linked mobile numbers of strangers to accounts of customers who hadn’t so far registered for online banking so that they can be registered to the app as users, boosting the sign-ups, revealed a whistleblower to The Collective.
Linking unauthorised mobile numbers exposes customers to the risk of fraud as the person with the registered mobile number gains access to the account and can change online banking passwords, get hold of new ATM cards , wipe clean bank accounts and much more — they can become account holders in the digital world.
So far, we don’t know if a customer has lost his money directly due to this fraudulent jugaad by the bank employees. But what's worrying is that routine audits, which looked at a whole range of banking activities, didn’t catch this fraud in the whistleblower’s branch.
So, who were the strangers whose mobile numbers were linked to the bank accounts of people who didn’t have a registered number? Anybody the bank employees could think of or lay their eyes on: bank staffers, sanitation and security workers and their relatives. Their phone numbers were used to generate the One-Time Password needed to join the app, and sign up these accounts from the back-end.
The employees would then deregister these customers from the app and reuse the same mobile number in the same manner with other bank accounts. In Bhopal zone alone, 1,300 mobile numbers of strangers were linked with 62,000 accounts. And the smoking gun is the internal emails, shared by the whistleblower, asking branches to clean up their act, which exposed customers to the risk of numerous frauds.
On the one hand, the management had been unlinking bogus mobile numbers from bank accounts to cover up its tracks but on the other, its branches had been linking bogus numbers to accounts en masse to meet the app registration target.
The misdeed is not limited to Bhopal zone, which was celebrated as the poster child of bob World registrations among other zonal managers. Employees of the bank’s branches in Gujarat, Rajasthan, Jharkhand and Uttar Pradesh too, have said they were forced to adopt similar workarounds to achieve registration target.