If you’re a Jamaican and you use a credit or debit card regularly, watch this!

A new report from the Bank of Jamaica says that credit and debit card fraud are the top two types of bank fraud in Jamaica.

The findings are published in the BOJ’s Financial Stability Report, which covers the period January 2018 to November 2022. 

PLEASE NOTE the timeline here, up to November 2022- so SSL didn’t happen yet when the report came out. 

The BOJ defined bank fraud as any use of unlawful means to obtain funds or other property owned by a financial institution or a customer of a financial institution.

Between 2018 and 2022, banks lost an AVERAGE of J$900 million a year, from almost 14,000 fraud cases.  That’s about US$6 million dollars a year. 

2019 was the worst year, with losses coming in at J$1.3 billion. That fell to J$800 million in 2020. 

And like I said earlier, credit and debit cards were the most targeted.

Credit card fraud made up 42% of overall losses, followed by debit card fraud with 40%. 

This isn’t surprising because scammers have been hitting ATMs and cell phones hard over the last couple of years. Everything from fake texts and emails to fake card readers at ATMs can give hackers access to your accounts. 

But there is some good news.

According to the BOJ, card fraud is coming down thanks to new security features.

And bank fraud actually declined by 11% between 2018 to 2022.  So those big losses I mentioned earlier, it used to be much worse!

Since 2018, several banks have introduced EMV chip and pin technology on bank cards, as well as multi-factor authentication and push notifications for bank accounts. 

Trust me, as soon as I swipe my card, I get an email and a text. It can be a little annoying but I’d choose that over being scammed any day.

According to the report, the third highest type of fraud in Jamaica was Internet banking, which averaged J$800 million a year.

Now let me tie this into another video I did recently about Jamaica facing the blacklist for not meeting global standards against money laundering and terrorist financing.  Being on that blacklist will affect our ability to shop online and do business globally.

The BOJ pointed out banking fraud is one of the bases of money laundering. And remember Jamaica has until October to show that we’re serious about cracking down. 

Jamaica has been on FATF’s Grey List since 2020.  They’ve been watching us very closely, so the agency is no doubt looking at reports like these.

The good news is like I said banking fraud is coming down. The bad news is, it’s still kinda high and might not be falling quickly enough.