S

tate-owned lender Bank Mandiri (BMRI) has begun to withdraw and replace its customers' debit cards over indications of skimming, an executive has said.

According to Mandiri senior executive vice president for transaction banking Rico Usthavia Frans, the bank started receiving reports from its customers last Friday.

'There were indications that their card details had been skimmed at ATMs. We then examined other cards and saw similar indications,' he said on Monday. 'So we began replacing customers' cards last Friday.'

Rico declined to provide further details on the number of cards that had been replaced, but said the amount of money lost varied from one customer to another.

'Some lost Rp 250,000 [US$21.69], while others lost Rp 1 million or Rp 2 million,' he said, adding that the replacement process was still ongoing.

Mandiri, Rico said, would compensate customers' losses if they were proven to be victims of fraud.

Its latest report shows that the bank had 11.59 million debit cards as of March.

The number rose from 10.44 million a year ago and from 11.39 million recorded in December 2013.

In the first quarter of this year, the lender's ATM transactions stood at Rp 192.6 trillion, up 8.6 percent from the same period in 2013.

Meanwhile, this incident follows a separate case in Surakarta, Central Java, in which a man was accused of withdrawing and transferring Rp 21 billion from bank accounts belonging to him and his wife, which were in credit by less than Rp 200,000.

The man allegedly took advantage of an error while the bank was upgrading its software on April 10.

The two cases have once again highlighted the need for lenders to step up security features as required by the financial regulator.

Bank Indonesia (BI), which is in charge of payment systems in Indonesia, rolled out a regulation in 2009, which stipulates that all debit cards must be equipped with a chip by Dec. 31, 2015, at the latest.

BI executive director for payment system Rosmaya Hadi said that the chip would provide more security for customers than the magnetic strip currently used.

'A chip will make fraud harder,' she said in a previous event.

Rico said that the bank would stick to the deadline already set up by the regulator to replace its current cards with the new ones.

'In the meantime, we are calling on customers to subscribe to SMS banking or SMS alert services,' he said.

'They will let customers know when a transaction of over Rp 1 million takes place.'

Separately, Bank Mandiri president director Budi Gunadi Sadikin denied media reports that customers at its Cipto Mangunkusumo General Hospital in Central Jakarta had blocked their accounts in fear of fraud.

'We suggested that they suspended banking transactions until they have their cards replaced. That was just a precautionary measure,' he said, adding that it had identified the problem and was taking the necessary steps to solve it.