Senior Reporter
peter.christopher@guardian.co.tt
Despite several instances of major cyberattacks in T&T in recent years, the Central Bank is yet to implement a dedicated unit for cybersecurity.
This was admitted by Michelle Francis Pantor, deputy inspector of financial institutions who made the comments during the Central Bank during a Joint Select Committee (JSC) sitting yesterday, which examined the existing anti-fraud and customer protection systems in the local financial services sector.
“There is no one unit that is specialising in cybersecurity and fraud. Just to say we are not fraud investigators, we take it from an operational risk standpoint and ensure that the requisite controls internal controls, risk management processes, etc. in place,” Pantor said in response to a question posed by Port-of-Spain South MP Keith Scotland about current mechanisms to address cybersecurity.
She added there is a financial institution supervision department that does ongoing supervision of financial institutions and monitoring. “There’s the market conduct function which now resides under the office of the financial services ombudsman. In terms of cybersecurity supervision, specifically, there is no unit established at this point in time,” Pantor added.
She explained that the bank did recognise that cybersecurity was a top two concern globally and it had been undergoing training and working on advice from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) concerning its approach.
“The Central Bank is aware that cybersecurity has been increasing with the efforts towards digitalisation, we know this is only going to increase it is one of the top two risks everywhere in the world. cybersecurity, we have in this regard we would have commissioned technical assistance from the International Monetary Fund and that has been ongoing.
“We have been trained in our examiner’s report was published by the IMF. It was public, it was publicly available. One of the recommendations is to shore up our resources with respect to cyber security.
“This is under active consideration at the bank at the present time,” Pantor said.
She continued, “How that will evolve, whether it’s a specialised unit, whether it’s additional persons has not been determined at this point.”
During the JSC, Fraud Squad Senior Supt Arlet Groome also admitted there were significant challenges in identifying those who committed fraud through card skimming.
“We do have an enormous amount of ABM card fraud and credit card fraud. However, the difficulty is because it’s like a hidden crime,” Groome said in response to Senator Jayanti Lutchmedial who recounted being defrauded of $40,000 after using her card at a pharmacy in 2018.
The senator while she had made a report and had her money refunded, both the bank and the police revealed they could not act on her information further.
Groome explained that despite such a report, officers often struggled to identify the actual perpetrator.
“We have no face to put to the camera like CCTV footage or anything or the internal cameras...It’s just we taking a bet and swiping a card, nobody asks for her ID or anything,” he said.
Groome said as a result in his 15 years of pursuing such cases there had been very few convictions. He, however, confirmed that since the introduction of chip cards, such reports had reduced significantly.