A House leader on Tuesday filed a bill declaring as economic sabotage the skimming of ATM cards, hacking a bank system, and unauthorized access to online bank applications, and other fraudulent activities.
In filing House Bill 5943, Eastern Samar Rep. Ben Evardone, chairman of the House Committee on Banks and Financial Intermediaries, declares as a crime of economic sabotage the skimming of at least 50 ATM cards, hacking of a bank system, or unauthorized access to at least 50 bank applications and accounts, regardless of clients’ monetary loss even as he proposes a penalty of life imprisonment and fine ranging from 1 to 5 million pesos.
Evardone’s bill defines skimming 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.
“With the fast advancement of technology came a new way of stealing one’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 in the bill’s explanatory note.
Evardone said that these acts erodes the “trust and confidence on the financial system in general and on the banking sector in particular.”
Once enacted, Evardone aaid his proposal will “avert further adverse losses on the financial sector” and thus secure the public’s “trust on the electronic financial and trade sectors.”