Chaos In Philippine As Money Goes Missing From Accounts

Imagine the pandemonium when Customers of Bank of the Philippine Islands (BPI) on Wednesday morning woke up to see unauthorised withdrawals and deposits from their accounts.

To fix the problem, the bank closed its automatic teller machines (ATMs) and told its eight million customers they could not do online transactions on Wednesday.

“Please do not panic… we will make sure that your money is there,” BPI senior vice president Cathy Santamaria said at a news conference as social media lit up with complaints from customers about missing money and inconvenience.

Efforts to fix the problem were “progressing well” and the glitch was expected to be resolved within the day, the bank added in a statement, although it did not explain why the glitch occurred.

There has been global concern about hacking following the world’s biggest ransomware attack last month that struck hundreds of thousands of computers worldwide.

Nestor Espenilla, the incoming governor of the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, the country’s central bank, said they had accepted “for now” BPI’s explanation that no hacking was involved, but would still conduct its own probe.

“We have no reason to believe otherwise at this point of time, but as I said this is standard operating procedure, we always verify every incident that we are aware of,” Espenilla said in a radio interview.

“For now I think it’s important that BPI resolves it as quickly as possible. We take their assurance that this is not a hack and no money will be lost.”