French investment
bank
The employee, who worked at
During its investigation, the FSA found that a flaw in the bank's IT system
allowed the senior employee to by-pass normal middle office processes, which
meant that basic authorisation and signatory checks were not carried out on
internal cash transfers between different customer accounts.
Furthermore, BNPP Private Bank did not have an effective review process for
transactions over £10,000 from clients' accounts. The regulator also found that
the bank's procedures were not clear about the role of senior management in
checking significant transfers prior to payment.
Margaret Cole, FSA director of enforcement, comments: "BNPP Private
Bank's failures exposed clients' accounts to the risk of fraud. This is
unacceptable particularly with the overall increase in awareness around fraud
and client money risks. Senior management must make sure their firms have
robust systems and controls to reduce the risk of them being used to commit
financial crime."
The bank also failed to improve its procedures for monitoring large
transactions or carry out remedial action on a timely basis, says the FSA,
despite being aware that some procedures required improvement as a result of an
examination of its anti-money laundering systems and controls in August 2002.
The FSA says this is the first time a private bank has been fined for
weaknesses in anti-fraud systems but warns that it is "raising its
game" against firms with lax controls.
"This is a warning to other firms that we are raising our game in this
area and expect them to follow suit. We will not hesitate to take action
against any firm found wanting," says Cole. (source)
We are pleased to see the FSA finally finding its teeth and beginning to use them against Banks that allow fraud.
However, we see that this was an internally perpetrated
fraud, rather than the more common ‘enabling of fraud’ by releasing or allowing
to be released
We hope that in the future the FSA will be taking similar
actions against Banks, Businesses and Public/Government Institutions for the
crime of ‘enabling fraud’ in the same way as the internal fraud cases.
Such crimes are covered by The Serious Crime Act which states the
following:
a person
has been involved in serious crime in
- has committed a serious offence
in a country outside
- has facilitated the commission
by another person of a serious offence in a country outside
- has conducted himself in a way
that was likely to facilitate the commission by himself or another person
of a serious offence in a country outside
a serious
offence in a country outside
Therefore, if a Bank or Business is hacked, and that
business is found to have inadequate security, or if its actions were negligent
and allowed access (which includes dumping data in bins and laptop thefts), either
in the UK or overseas, and credit card details or
If we see the FSA forcing such institutions to starve
criminals of their source material, by investing in better security at the back
end, we can only see the fraud rates diminish, which in turn will lower the
argument for ID Cards of any kind.
Say NO to ID Cards, Say NO to the Database state.
