Solon wants million-peso fines, life imprisonment for bank fraud convicts

A lawmaker on Tuesday filed a bill seeking stiffer penalties such as life imprisonment and multi-million-peso fines for bank fraud activities.

House Bill 5934, authored by Eastern Samar Representative Ben Evardone, seeks to consider the skimming of ATM cards, hacking of a bank system, or unauthorized access to bank applications or accounts a crime of economic sabotage regardless of the amount involved

Violators will be penalized with life imprisonment and slapped with a fine ranging from P1 million up to P5 million.

In his explanatory note, Evardone, who chairs the House Committee on Banks and Financial Intermediaries, noted the advancement of technology as a new way of stealing an individual's money.

"Criminals and criminal syndicates were able to illegally access the various electronic medium of transactions and they were able to unlawfully appropriate to themselves the hard-earned money of others," Evardone said.

These acts, he said, erode the trust and confidence of the public on the financial system as well as the banking sector.

In the bill, skimming is defined as "a type of fraud which occurs when an ATM is compromised by a skimming device, a card reader which can be disguised to look like a part of the ATM machine and which saves the users' card number and pin code."

Evardone is hoping that the approval of the bill would prevent adverse losses on the financial sector and would secure the public's trust on the electronic financial and trade sectors. —NB, GMA News