Along with the development of e-commerce, the activity to collect information of consumers has been increasingly growing in new ways and sizes. Many bad people have used this type of information to commit fraud.
The Department of Competition and Consumer Protection (Ministry of Industry and Trade) said that in 2017, the agency received more than 40 complaints from consumers about receiving calls and messages from social networks providing information to deceive consumers.
Most of these related activities contain at least some accurate consumer information, such as name, home address, and purchase behaviours performed in the past, etc. “This accurate information is an important basis for consumers to trust the offers of the objects. In many cases, consumers were enticed to give the fraudsters an amount of money, ranging from 1-2 million dong to several tens of millions or even 100 million dong”, said a representative of the Department of Competition and Consumer Protection.
In fact, Vietnamese enterprises can easily buy a list of customers with detailed information and use this information to call, text, and email customers for different purposes, including a number of behaviours with signs of law violation or even fraud commitment.
Therefore, to protect consumers using financial services, it is necessary to ensure that some principles of consumer rights in e-commerce transactions are applied the same level of protection like in traditional transactions.
Protecting consumers from risks
To overcome these problems, James Callon, expert of IFC in protecting consumers using financial services said that the experience from many countries shows that the best practice in protecting consumers using financial services is to complete the legal framework, institutional and major components of a credit reporting system geared towards consumer protection.
A good credit information system needs to be safe and effective, focusing on protecting the interests of consumers in the process of collecting information and sharing information among service users.
James Callon added that credit information providers need to consider protecting consumers as a core part of their operation to ensure the quality and reliability of the database, helping strengthening the trust of customers using the services and consumers in the credit information system in general.
The fact that some of these organisations have appropriated assets of customers of some financial institutions is no longer rare in Vietnam. The way to resolve disputes still does not show that the legitimate rights and interests of consumers are given top priority.
Hoang Hung, IFC’s senior expert in credit report shared at a recent conference in Hochiminh city themed Protecting consumers using financial services that many employers have forced their employees to open accounts at a certain bank, while the employees should only need to give account information of their choice to the human resource department and the employers are responsible to transfer the employees’ salary or income to these accounts.
This case also occurs to student insurance as some schools determine where to buy insurance instead of letting the parents to choose the appropriate provider on the market and submit the insurance certificate under request (if any).
Like other financial service markets in the world, the risks of security and technology are and will be one of the major challenges for financial institutions. The damages caused by the third parties, due to infrastructure or security failure, may lead to many disputes with customers. Meanwhile, if there is no proper protection mechanism, customers can be disadvantaged.
Protecting the interests of consumers using financial services, when cannot rely on the self-consciousness of financial institutions, must be the responsibility of the policy makers, related management agencies, civil organisations representing consumers, and finally each consumer himself.
