NBTC secretary-general Thakorn Tantasith said a team would be set up to look into the case involving True Corp, which has been asked to compensate a customer who lost nearly Bt1 million from |his bank account due to a mix-up |by the cellular operator.

Thakorn said his office would have an urgent letter sent to warn all mobile phone operators to strictly check the identity of customers who asked for new SIM cards for their current numbers.

He said fingerprint scanning software would be used soon to protect consumers who use their mobile phones to do bank transactions. “We will have a public forum about this idea soon so it could be implemented by the end of this year.”

Shop-owner Phansutee Meeleukij found out on July 31 that soon after his cellphone service was cut off, someone used Internet banking to withdraw Bt986,700 from his Kasikornbank account.

An investigation revealed that the person had modified a copy of Phansutee’s ID card to get another SIM card from a True branch to receive the one-time password needed for an online transaction. Phansutee complained and eventually received all of his money back from Kasikornbank.

True Corporation executive Chakkrit Urairat said that there were cases of people losing their SIM cards and asking for new ones on a daily basis. But the process required the applicants to present original ID cards. He said the case of Phansutee would be used as cautionary tale for the company to be stricter.

Atchariya Rungrattanapong, president of the Club for Justice Under Investigation, said the request for a new SIM card for mobile phone numbers in current-use should require an original copy of a person’s ID card – not just a photocopy that the culprit in this case used.

“I also want to warn people that the barcodes on people’s ID cards could be scanned by a smartphone application for the 13-digit numbers, so people should be careful,” he said.