Fraud: CBN Places 7,552 BVN On Watchlist

The Central Bank of Nigeira (CBN) has placed 7,552 Bank Verification Numbers (BVN) on its watchlist for fraudulent transactions, even as the Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) known as eNaira, has recorded 1.4 million transactions to date.

Speaking on Tuesday at the 34th Finance Correspondents and Business Editors seminar in Calabar, Cross River State, themed “Implementing a Robust Payment Architecture Prospects, Opportunities and Challenges”, the Governor of the CBN, Godwin Emefiele said, the Nigeria payment system landscape has particularly continued to record significant changes and development.

Represented by the director of Monetary Policy, Dr Hassan Mahmud, Emefiele revealed that the total enrollment of BVN as at March 31, 2023 stood at 57.43 million, adding that, the BVN has also helped the industry in investigating fraud and other related crimes.

“The BVN is supporting the development of credit profiles for banking customers, which will assist in improving access to credit for credit-worthy borrowers by banks. BVN has continued to feature in our KYC requirements as part of plans to ease the constraint associated with poor identification of banking customers. We have continued to support the aggressive enrollment of prospective banking customers in the informal sector onto the BVN system,” he pointed out.

Emefiele noted that, cyber threats and fraud activities of fraudsters continue to threaten the resilience of the payment platforms and that the confidence of the public is impacted by these activities. He disclosed that there are collaborative effort between the Central Bank of Nigeria and other players in the industry to curtail the nefarious activities of these fraudsters.

To him, “in response to the challenges posed by cyber threats, the CBN is addressing these hiccups with the Nigeria Electronic Fraud Forum (NeFF), payment card industry data security standard, the financial industry cybersecurity fusion centre and other initiatives against cybersecurity and fraud in Nigeria.”

Promising that the bank will also continue to adopt a collaborative approach to achieve minimal cybersecurity threats in the payments system, he said: “a holistic mechanism for addressing cybersecurity threats requires policy and operational actions by all stakeholders.

“As you are aware, effective January 2023, the Bank issued a Risk-Based Cyber-Security Framework and Guidelines for Other Financial Institutions, to ensure their operational resilience in the face of cyber-security threats.

In his paper, the Director of Payment Systems Management, CBN, Musa Jimoh, who was represented by the Deputy Director, Payment Systems, Adefuye Adeyemi, revealed that, 7,552 BVN are on watchlist for fraud-related transactions.

According to him, the centralisation of the BVN has enabled the CBN to track fraudulent individuals and entities who have engaged in forgery, compromise, complicity, fraudulent duplicate enrolment and any fraudulent infraction with and without monetary value