Singapore — After realising that microtransactions were being deducted from his bank account that he was unaware of, a member of the public took to Facebook and implored others to be vigilant and check their bank accounts regularly.
He posted about his experience in a Facebook group named “Complaint Singapore“.
In his caption, he first urged others to check their bank details and explained that microtransactions can happen to people without them or their banks knowing. As the status of the transactions changes from ‘pending’ to ‘transferred’ in a period of time, the netizen says that it is important to check on one’s account quickly.
The netizen added that just in the span of a few minutes, he lost a lot of money. He also remarks that he found such an occurrence to be more common than he thought, and questions the strength of the bank’s security systems.
At the end of his post, he establishes that he did not carry out the transactions and that he did not get tricked into it either.
He also provided a screenshot of the microtransactions, saying that he got hacked and that the hacker had spent all his money.
The subsequent pictures were of conversations he had with several contacts who revealed that they had lost money similarly too.
One netizen provided several reasons why the microtransactions occurred.
A few netizens commented on the importance of One-time passwords (OTP) and 2FA (two-factor authentication) since OTPs could warn people of transactions that were about to be carried out. One netizen, in particular, urged others not to save their credit card information on websites since some websites do not require an OTP.
Yet another stated that she felt insecure even with OTPs or 2FA and made it a point to check her bank account now and then to minimise losses. Â
You Zi Xuan is an intern at The Independent SG. /TISG