GCash says corrections made to prevent repeat of reconciliation errors

GCash, operated by G-Xchange Inc., on Monday said it has made corrections to avoid a repeat of the inadvertent debiting that affected several users over the weekend due to errors in its system reconciliation process.

According to Globe Telecom Inc. president and chief executive officer Ernest Cu, there were no unauthorized fund losses, as several users on Saturday reported transactions with amounts said to have been claimed by unknown users.

“It’s a reconciliation issue that some wallets were debited inadvertently. Now what is most important and what we should all focus on is that whatever errors occurred, they were rectified very quickly,” he said in a virtual briefing.

“No consumer lost any fund. The accounts were restored within 24 hours and corrections were indeed made on process that will ensure that this does not happen again,” he added.

GCash is registered with the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) as a non-bank financial institution electronic money issuer (EMI-NBMF). It is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Mynt (Globe Fintech Innovations Inc.), which is in turn a partnership of Globe Telecom, the Ayala Corp., and Ant Financial.

Cu’s remarks come after GCash users said they received notifications of transactions that funds were taken from their accounts. Among them was comedian Pokwang, who said she lost P85,000 from her account.

GCash on Sunday said it has completed the necessary wallet adjustments, and that customer accounts were safe, with security remaining as the top priority.

The Ayala Group, through its wholly-owned unit AC Ventures Holdings Inc., in August announced plans to increase its stake in Mynt by an additional 8%. Japanese lender Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (MUFG), through its consolidated subsidiary MUFG Bank Ltd., is also acquiring an 8% stake.

In the same briefing, Globe general counsel and Corporate and Legal Services Group head Atty. Froilan Castelo said the company continues to work with authorities regarding scams proliferating through mobile messaging, following the SIM Registration Act.

“The SCRA is actually serving its purpose, and if you have noticed the trends of the scams right now, it’s off the network, meaning to say it’s being done through social messaging like Messenger, Viber, and the likes,” he told reporters.

“But just the same, we are in constant coordination with our regulators and the police authorities with respect to the apprehension… and the arrest of these scammers,” he added.

Advocacy group Digital Pinoys in September called for a review of the SIM Registration Act, as it noted that scammers now use applications such as Telegram, Viber, Messenger, and Signal for fraudulent schemes.

For its part, the National Telecommunications Commission (NTC) admitted that SIM registration is not a “silver bullet” against text scams, as it continues to face several challenges in its implementation.—AOL, GMA Integrated News