Yes Bank takes measures to safeguard impacted forex card users

Private sector lender Yes Bank said it detected a spike in declined transactions on a Multi-Currency Prepaid Forex Card, issued in partnership with BookMyForex, a part of the MakeMyTrip group.

The bank has said that suspicious transactions were attempted at 15 merchants based in a Latin American country during the early hours of 24 February, between 3:30 am and 8:30 am IST. That country does not mandate two-factor authentication for online purchases, which enabled the attempted transactions.

An internal investigation by the bank revealed that transactions worth approximately $0.28 million [~₹3 crore] were approved across 5,000 customers during the period. The bank’s fraud monitoring systems were able to decline 688 of these attempts, preventing potential losses of around $0.1 million [~₹93 lakh].

The bank has now blocked all e-commerce transactions originating from that Latin American country. It is now working with the card network to initiate chargebacks so that affected customers do not incur any financial loss.

Online forums have several members complaining of a series of transactions on their prepaid cards that began late in the night.

The Yes Bank website says that the card was developed in collaboration with Yes Bank and M2P, and powered by Visa. It is designed “to empower international travelers... with interbank-linked forex rates for 14 currencies, zero issuance, load, reload, or annual fees and is accepted globally”.