Dehradun, India – A Bank of Baroda officer from Bhopal zone recalls the day he and his colleagues got the order from their regional office to report to work at 7am on March 24 last year.
They were given a task: sign up customers for the bank’s new app, “bob World”, which was launched six months before. The officer’s branch was given a target of onboarding at least 150 existing bank customers.
As the day progressed, the officer and his colleagues struggled to get people to sign up while their regional office kept tabs on them and reprimanded them for poor performance.
The officer, who requested that his identity not be revealed for fear of reprisal from the bank and who will be referred to as Whistleblower 1, got desperate.
He and his colleagues learned of a workaround from peers in other branches: fetch the list of bank accounts not linked to mobile numbers, link these accounts to any mobile numbers they could gather – of bank staffers, sanitation and security workers and their relatives – to generate the one-time password (OTP) needed to join the app, and sign up these accounts from the back end. The employees would then deregister these customers from the app and reuse the same mobile number in the same manner with other bank accounts.
When the nodal officer from the regional office – one officer was deputed at each branch to ensure the success of the task – was told about the tactic, he offered his as well as his wife’s mobile numbers to link with customers’ bank accounts.
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