So a guy has posted a depressing story about how he got hacked and scammed a total of RM30,000 ($7330) by a highly-skilled scammer which capitalize the loopholes of the banking system.

You can read the full story from this Facebook post here. It's worth a read. The banks involved are AmBank, Maybank and OCBC Bank.

I was annoyed reading this story. My first thought was similar to his: banks were actually insured up to RM250K for personal accounts, but yet OCBC bank chose not to take the option and told him that it was his fault that his funds were lost to a scammer. Quoted by PIDM: "PIDM promotes public confidence in Malaysia's financial system by protecting depositors against the loss of their deposits." In addition with another quote: "PIDM contributes to the stability of the financial system by dealing with member institution failures expeditiously and reimbursing depositors as soon as possible". However, in a brochure uploaded by PIDM, your deposits are protected by PIDM if the bank that you deposit your money into is bankrupt (Read their brochure here). This means that unless if it's a good reason, as long as the bank is not bankrupt, banks can choose not to return you your funds if they feel the loss is because of your clumsiness. Another annoying thing about fiat banks in Malaysia is that we don't have additional 2FA system. Yes, 2FA have its flaws, but it's definitely faster to verify and more secure than the usual username/password combo and TAC verification which exposes your personal data. All big crypto exchanges at least encouraged you, or making it compulsory to enable 2FA before you can make any withdrawals.

A good example of a highly secure, centralized platform in the crypto space that banks can learn is Celsius Network. You can, and highly advisable, to activate 2FA to unlock your account. In a situation where a hacker managed to access the 2FA codes, hack into your account and try to move your funds, if you enable HODL mode and change the whitelist address, it would take days to be able to unlock these modes. Moreover, Celsius and other big CeFi platforms will notify you via email if you login to your account, so that if you don't, you can directly report to the management and they'll take care of the breach as soon as possible. Even so, it's not 100% safe to have all of your funds in centralized platforms, that's why DeFi is created to solve the issues of banks taking hold of your accounts where it gives full control back to you to be responsible of your wealth. The only risk for this is not to lose your private keys or publicly share your private keys to anyone. Given time to develop, I truly believed the blockchain and DeFi ecosystems will solve this broken financial system. 

This story has warned us that even banks are not safe to store your cash, and the current banking insurance system is also broken, so it's important to diversify your wealth to other assets such as stocks, bonds and cryptos, while also create accounts in multiple and trustable banks so not to lose all of your fiat money in one place.