NCB freezes 300 accounts amid apparent scam involving Uber transactions

By Prince Moore    

 

The National Commercial Bank has disclosed that 300 accounts were frozen in what appears to be a scam involving transactions for Uber transport services.

 

Uber is a ride-hailing application.

 

Some NCB customers have taken issue with large deductions from their accounts at once due to a technical issue which affected Uber transactions on their Visa debit cards.

 

Danielle Cameron Duncan, Vice President of Payment Services & Digital Channels at NCB, says 8,000 accounts have been affected in total, but 300 of them appeared to be involved in malicious activities. 

 

She says a fraud probe is underway into the flow of transactions. 

 

"Because it's not likely that one individual is taking 23 rides a day for 30 days in a month, and we're seeing that; 700 rides done by one individual account in a month or $30,000 tips for an $800 transaction, or 15 Uber rides in an hour. So that's the behaviour that we're seeing in some of these accounts, the 300 accounts in particular that we have frozen," she disclosed while speaking Wednesday on Radio Jamaica's Beyond the Headlines. 

 

Mrs. Cameron Duncan noted that NCB did not announce the deductions as some customers would have found ways to circumvent the process. 

 

"The first thing that would happen, especially for some of the malicious actors is they would go and pull the money out of their account, so we didn't announce it. What we did do is we did start posting the individual transactions because we wanted to make sure there was transparency and so you could see the value of each individual ride that you had taken and the date that you had taken that ride, to the accounts immediately."

 

The bank says it has processed the owed balances where there are funds in the accounts or temporarily placed liens on accounts with insufficient funds until the outstanding amounts are recovered.  

 

According to Mrs. Cameron Duncan, NCB is willing to discuss payment options for those customers who did not seek to take advantage of the system and are having a difficulty paying for all the transactions at once. 

 

She urged affected customers to email cem@jncb.com.