We may have come a long way from the days of the old American ‘west’ when bank robberies were committed by bands of brigands ‘toting’ guns and barking orders to terrified tellers to ‘open the safe’ and making off with bags of money. These days, the banking sector has drifted deep into the world of security-related technology. So too have the bank robbers.
Republic Bank Ltd’s recent Visa Debit Card fraud, the attendant public response and the subsequent intervention of the Bank of Guyana on the issue of the bank’s refunds to the victims of the fraud provided a sobering reminder that while gun-toting bandits may no longer be able to ‘trump’ technology, the bank robbers have been able to get around that problem by simply joining the technology bandwagon.
Accordingly, these days one of the problems with addressing the contemporary bank robbery, of course, is the time, intellectual energy and technological know-how it takes to figure out how the crime was actually effected. It is easier, after all, to work out the modus operandi of masked, gun-toting bandits barking orders at ready-to-comply tellers. After the banks come to understand that their technological defences have been breached, they then, arch-conservative institutions that they are, begin to count their losses and afterwards consider how those losses can be cut.
