Ensuring security and safety to prevent cyber frauds

Delivering his opening speech at the Conference, Senior Lieutenant General Luong Tam Quang informed that, in light of the complicated situation of cyber frauds over the past time, causing serious damage to various organizations and individuals, resulting in negative impacts on the development, it is necessary to conduct a comprehensive and thorough evaluation, and come up with effective solutions to prevent and combat cyber frauds.

According to the Deputy Minister of the MPS, cyber frauds account for 57% of cyber crimes, and they have increased both in scale and the sophistication of the frauds, with fraudsters now using new technologies, especially the artificial intelligence (AI) to trick their victims, causing losses worth trillions of dollars each year globally.

The United Nations and a number of international and regional organizations have been strongly promoting the international cooperation and coordination among countries, and have been establishing common principles to minimize the risks.

On the countries’ level, more than 160 countries, including big countries, have frequently issued new policies to enhance the data protection, prevent data theft for frauds or to demand ransoms.

In 2023, in Vietnam, domestic and international cyber criminals constantly changed their methods and tricks, taking advantage of new technologies to attack, hack and conduct large-scale frauds, causing serious economic losses, resulting in negative impacts on the social order and security, and threatening the life and peace of many people.

According to Senior Lieutenant General Quang, the methods and tricks of fraudsters now are so sophisticated, using Deepface technology to impersonate their victims’ relatives, or deceive as representatives of some authorities, or call for investment into some foreign exchanges or crypto currencies, stock, etc.

The cyber criminals mainly target the elderly, students, workers with unstable jobs or low income, and even children (people who own smartphones, participating in the online environment with poor ability to identify signs of frauds). In this situation, the Deputy Minister of the MPS asserted that it is urgent to prevent and minimize the losses caused by the cyber frauds.

In addition, the process of handling cyber fraud cases still faces a number of difficulties, especially when it takes a long time to coordinate with the credit institutions to trace the cash flows originated from frauds. The coordination with online service providers also takes a lot of time, and the effectiveness is not very high; the Information is often provided late, and the fraudsters’' IP addresses cannot be determined when they use 3G or 4G networks.

Although using junk SIM cards, buying and selling bank accounts have received a lot of attention for handling, these acts are still common, making it difficult to investigate cyber frauds.

Regarding cyber frauds in the banking operations, Mr. Pham Tien Dzung, Deputy Governor of the SBV, Vice Chairman of the National Cybersecurity Association, shared that, in fact, fraudsters have a lot of sophisticated tricks, including three main forms commonly found when they target their victims' bank accounts, i.e.: Manipulating the victims’ psychological feelings and force them to voluntarily transfer their money to other accounts identified by the criminals; Taking control of the victims’ devices and perform their desired operations; and Stealing information on their victims’ devices and transfer it to other devices with the purpose of misappropriation. As a State management agency, the SBV always provides close instructions to the system of credit institutions to prevent, guide and warn their customers about fraudulent acts.

The SBV Deputy Governor further shared that preventing cyber frauds is always a key task in the banking sector's development plans. The banking sector always considers the security and safety to be the critical elements to prevent the risks of losses for customers. However, the banking sector also has to face with a difficulty when it is a sector with unique and special characteristics with large amounts and a big scale of transactions. According to the statistics, currently, over 95% of payment transactions have been made online, with only 5% of transactions are made at the counter; with a total transaction value of VND 200,000 trillion a year, or about VND 830 trillion per day.

Opportunities and challenges always coexist, especially when the economy enters a peak period of digital transformation. Therefore, in order to realize the solutions for fraud prevention in the banking sector, it is necessary to enhance the close coordination between the SBV and the relevant Ministries and agencies to improve the legal corridor, and promptly develop management regulations to quickly trace all fraudsters and to protect customers.

An overview of the Conference

Enhancing close coordination among authorities to prevent cyber frauds

In the coming time, the Department of Cyber ​​Security and Hi-tech Crime Prevention will focus on the formulation of a Law on personal data protection, a Decree on administrative penalties related to cyber security, etc., in order to help improve the effectiveness of the fight against cyber crimes in general and cyber frauds in particular; Implementing a variety of communication and education activities, calling for the participation of organizations, businesses, and the people to effectively and extensively implement communication and education campaigns against cyber frauds. In addition, the Department of Cyber ​​Security and Hi-tech Crime Prevention will also continue to coordinate closely with the functional units of the Ministry of Information and Communications and the SBV to implement synchronous solutions with the aim to prevent and eliminate the causes and enabling conditions for cyber frauds and other criminal acts against the laws.

The SBV Deputy Governor went on to inform that recently, the SBV had coordinated with the relevant Ministries and agencies, and had come to an agreement on the solutions against cyber frauds. In April 2023, the SBV and the Ministry of Public Security signed Coordination Plan No. 01/KHPH-BCA-NHNNVN dated April 24, 2023 on implementing the Scheme on developing applications for the population, personal identification and electronic authentication data to support the national digital transformation in the 2022-2025 period, vision to 2030 (Scheme 06), which comprises of 11 major tasks and 35 specific tasks, to ensure safe connection of the population database in implementing banking services. In addition, on February 28, 2024, the SBV and the Ministry of Public Security jointly organized a Thematic Conference on information security and safety in the banking sector, which was chaired by the SBV Governor.

The SBV is currently consolidating a database of suspected fraudulent payment accounts and e-wallets, thereby warning the credit institutions to enhance their authentication when these accounts are used for transactions. In addition, since July 1, 2024, implementing Decision No. 2345/QD-NHNN dated December 18, 2023 of the SBV Governor, all banking transactions exceeding VND 10 million must be biometrically authenticated. In the coming time, the SBV will strengthen the coordination with the Ministries and agencies, promote the dissemination and communication about the legal documents, and request the credit institutions to focus on communicating, educating and instructing their employees and customers to raise their awareness and skills against cyber frauds.

Deputy Governor Pham Tien Dzung emphasized that it is necessary to clean and authenticate customers' data in accordance with Decision No. 2345/QD-NHNN. So far, 24 credit institutions have sent their data to the Ministry of Public Security for information cleaning. There is no perfect solution, only appropriate solutions, in which it is impossible for the banking sector to resolve by itself, but it requires the coordination of the Ministry of Public Security and the Ministry of Information and Communications,…

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