Chaos as money goes missing from bank accounts
A major Philippine bank was forced to shut down online transactions and their ATMs on Wednesday after money went missing from customer accounts, triggering fears the major bank had been hacked.
Customers of Bank of the Philippine Islands (BPI) discovered on Wednesday morning unauthorised withdrawals and deposits from their accounts.
BPI said in a statement the problem was caused by an "internal data processing error" that had been identified, although did not explain why the glitch occurred.
But the bank had to tell its eight million customers that they could not use ATMS or conduct online transactions on Wednesday as they fixed the problem.
"Please do not panic... we will make sure that your money is there," BPI senior vice president Cathy Santamaria said at a news conference.
There are fears the error was caused by hacking after the world’s biggest ransomware attack last month that affected hundreds of thousands of computers worldwide.
Nestor Espenilla, the incoming governor of the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, the country's central bank, said he had accepted "for now" BPI's explanation that no hacking was involved.
"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."