And sadly, the reality is that there isn't much that local or even regional banks have been able to do to protect their customers from phasing scammers.
According to Clare that's because the people behind these cyber crimes are very sophisticated in the digital space. We asked him how prepared he feels Caribbean and Belizean banks are to defend us against these threats. The answer was not encouraging.
Kent Clare, Director, FIU
"There are persons who take time, this is their livelihood. This is actually their profession or vocation to try and establish ways of making a criminal living by just studying something like this but I agree with you it's. It appears to be scary."
Cherisse Halsall:
"And so what that prompts immediately is, you wonder, Belize tends to be behind when it comes to technology, we are slow to catch up but are we that far behind in cyber technology that for example, a Chinese hacker could come here and just have a field day?"
Kent Clare, Director, FIU
"Yeah, actually it is very very possible, not only here I mean we are talking to our colleagues within our community of FIU's within the Caribbean and some of the same things are happening and here is what happens. A person doesn't need to operate in an elaborate setting to do this, there are simple machines and so on that they can use of course we are a friendly country we invite tourists to come here they pass through, they can set up shop in any location that has internet with a very strong signal and they can do something like. This and the question for us always is trying to learn not only how much, how they were able to hack the system but how they were able to get the proceeds of the crime out. Um, oftentimes like in the past you would have seen them using things like gift cards so they'd tell someone to go and buy a gift card and send that to me with the numbers. That is valid as transferred on the internet so in this case we are looking to see indeed, um, how the perpetrators were. Well, not really the perpetrators but the persons who were used who were duped into using their accounts to get these monies what is it you were instructed to do to re-patriate the money. And that is going to give us a very good insight into what, and how we have to respond in the future."
And while Clare encourages victims to make police reports, he also encourages them to come directly to the FIU with their complaints. On Friday he told 7News that contrary to the police's advice that they would be the ones to contact the FIU, victims of cyber crimes are encouraged to go to the FIU's website and access their "other resources" tab. Once there he says there is a drop-down box that allows for the reporting of a cybercrime.
