Stampin MP resubmits appeals for 10 unresolved bank scams to Finance Ministry, calls for timely resolution

Chong Chieng Jen

By DayakDaily Team

KUCHING, July 9: Stampin MP Chong Chieng Jen has resubmitted the appeals for 10 bank scam cases in January 2023 to the Ministry of Finance (MOF), calling for timely resolutions.

He said he brought up the issue of bank scams in Parliament today, and Deputy Minister of Finance Lim Hui Ying had responded, saying that there are regulations whereby banks must carry out detailed investigations on every complaint of bank scams.

The law stated that the victims must be compensated if the scams are found due to system weakness while victims must be reasonably compensated if the scams are found due to negligence of account holders.

On this matter, Chong said he confronted Lim, arguing that banks had not been practising such policy or regulation.

“There is no way a victim of a bank scam who is a layman can ever prove ‘the system weakness of a bank’ and no bank will ever admit that there are some weaknesses in its system resulting in the scam.

“When the negligence is on the victims, the banks will never pay any compensation,” he said in a statement today.

Therefore, he requested MOF to provide statistics for the past two years on the number of bank scam complaints, the number of scam cases due to system weakness, the number of scam cases due to account holder negligence, and the number of victims who have been paid compensation.

For more specific cases, Chong cited the 10 complaints he had forwarded to MOF in January 2023, all of which, he claimed, have not been resolved and no compensation paid to the victims.

“In all those 10 cases, money was withdrawn from their accounts without their knowledge and authorisation, yet in such circumstances, the banks just refused to compensate them.

“I urge the Deputy Minister to apply the regulations which she has just mentioned in Parliament and test it on the 10 cases that I now resubmit to her again for resolution.” — DayakDaily