ON the night of Feb 5, 2016, hackers pushed 35 fraudulent payment instructions through the SWIFT interbank messaging system. By the time Bangladesh Bank detected the breach, $81 million had left its account at the New York Federal Reserve and landed in the Philippines. Most of it was never recovered. There was no break-in, no border crossed, no vault touched — the heist happened entirely through a screen.

But this is not only a story about central banks. The same battle is now fought daily on the phone in your pocket. It is the call from someone claiming to be ‘from your bank’, warning that your card is being blocked and asking you to ‘verify’ your details. It is the fake loan app, the link that looks exactly like your bank’s website but is not. The Bangladesh Bank robbers needed months of planning to trick a central bank. Today’s fraudster needs only a phone call and 30 seconds of your trust.

The reason this matters to every Pakistani household is simple: our money now lives on digital rails. Nine in 10 retail payments in Pakistan are made digitally — the salary that arrives in an account, the pension drawn from an ATM, the remittance sent from Dubai, the utility bill paid from a mobile app, the shopkeeper’s QR........

© Dawn