The government should order financial institutions to implement stricter or more secure measures when their payment cards are bound to consumption platforms, lawmaker Ron Lam has suggested.
In his latest written inquiry, the lawmaker addressed the problem of abuse of debit or credit cards. He revealed that he had from time to time received requests for assistance concerning this matter.
While urging the government to do more in this regard, the lawmaker recapped that years ago, cases related to payment card data being recorded via the installation of illicit card readers at ATM card slots had occurred across the city.
However, after the local monetary authority followed its Hong Kong counterpart’s practice of ordering financial institutions to replace magnetic strip cards to chip cards by a fixed deadline, as well as deactivating by a default overseas withdrawal function, such cases had disappeared in Macau, the lawmaker added.
Therefore, he suggested that the local monetary service gatekeeper once again follow their Hong Kong counterpart, by requiring financial institutions to introduce a wider range of methods to verify their customers’ intentions to bind their payment cards to a new device or app.
According to Lam, the Hong Kong Monetary Authority suggested two-way text messages, confirmation through institutions’ apps, as well as calls returned to the institutions. The Hong Kong authority requires institutions to adopt this new measure no later than the end of May.
He also said it was important that financial institutions handle payment card abuse with fairness. For example, he revealed, some banks did not honor monetary losses caused by payment card abuse. As such, he hopes the local monetary authority can follow its Hong Kong counterpart to require financial institutions to handle affected customers “with empathy.”
The number of cases related to the misuse of payment cards recorded from 2020 to 2022 was 411, 663 and 174, respectively over each of the years. The number of such cases in Hong Kong in 2021, when it had a population of more than 7.4 million people, was 700.
