Around 5,000 customers of Yes Bank’s multi-currency prepaid forex card, issued in partnership with BookMyForex, were hit by a spate of fraudulent transactions in early hours of Monday, and transactions worth $280,000 were approved during the incident, the bank said on Wednesday.
The bank’s fraud-monitoring systems triggered transaction rejections between 3:30 a.m. and 8:30 a.m. (IST). According to the bank, the unauthorised attempts were confined to specific bank identification numbers (BINs) and were routed through 15 merchants based in the same Latin American jurisdiction.
The country in question does not mandate two-factor authentication (2FA) for e-commerce transactions, a gap that fraudsters are believed to have exploited. As a precautionary step, Yes Bank has since restricted e-commerce transactions originating from that geography.
The bank’s real-time surveillance systems blocked 688 unauthorised attempts, the statement said.
The lender said it is working closely with the card network to initiate the charge-back processes and ensure that customers concerned do not suffer any financial loss. It maintained that enhanced monitoring and swift containment measures helped limit the scale of the incident.
The episode underscores the vulnerability of cross-border card transactions in markets where additional authentication layers are not mandatory, even as Indian banks continue to strengthen fraud detection frameworks amid rising digital payment volumes.