By Babajide Komolafe

Electronic payment is very good. It makes life convenient and allows you to achieve more with less. I remember the long queues people go through just to pay for satellite T.V subscriptions. Now you can do the same thing from your mobile phone, from anywhere in the world.

Alternatively you can use ATM and make the same payment.   Also, with e-payment, you don’t need to go through the stress of going to the airport or office of travel agencies to book and pay for flight. You can do this either from your phone, the internet or from ATM.

E-payment has also made life less stressful for students, especially those studying in far places. Gone are the days when you have to look for somebody traveling home, to help you visit your parents or guardian to collect money for you.

Parents and guardians can now transfer money to their wards from their phones, ATM or the internet, which can be cashed via ATM at anytime by the student. These and many more are the benefits of embracing e-payment for payment of goods and services.

These benefits, however, also come with lots of risks. Like every other thing in life, e-payment is not insulated from the nefarious activities of fraudsters.

Hence the risk of losing money, huge amount of money, is part of the realities of e-payment.
For example, a woman was in Lagos, and started receiving SMS alerts of withdrawals from her bank account, via ATM.

Though it was done in Nigeria, the SMS alert code were disguised to indicate the withdrawals were been carried out in Ghana. Within minutes, she lost all the money in her account to the fraudsters. Another man that had close to N1 million in his account reserved to take care of delivery and post natal expenses when his expectant wife delivers.

By the time he needed the money and tried to withdraw from his account, the balance in the account was   N700, 000 less than what he expected. Fraudsters had withdrawn his money through Point of Sale (PoS) terminal.

These are just examples of the many incidences of how people have lost money through e-payment channels. Yes, there have been measures and policies to protect bank customers from this risk. But the incidence has not abated. Today, e-payment fraud accounts for the highest number of frauds in banks and other financial institutions.

You can however escape being a victim. The first step is to acknowledge the reality of the risk of e-payment, and its vulnerabilities to the activities of fraudsters. Secondly, and most importantly, you need to be acquainted with how e-payment fraudsters operate and how to checkmate them. (To be continued).