Credit where credit is due?

Pundits often allege that our local authorities are incapable of apprehending and punishing the perpetrators of high-tech crimes. Concerned monitoring and enforcement agencies, they say, cannot keep up with the sophisticated tools and modus operandi of today’s thieves.

However, the Credit Card Association of the Philippines (CCAP) and officers of the Philippine National Police (PNP) Makati Station 3 and the Makati Central Police Station recently proved these skeptics wrong. Their collaboration resulted in the recent arrests of two persons suspected to have engaged in fraudulent credit card transactions. The two were identified as Gilbert Flores and Jeffrey Ragojos.

Apparently, the CCAP had been monitoring the spending activities of the accused young men (both are below 30 years old). It was noted that the two left compelling evidence of credit card fraud committed in various tourist destinations including Boracay, Calatagan, Camarines Sur, Hong Kong, and Macau.

Fraudsters beware! The CCAP keeps a tight watch on spurious credit card usage and reports any anomalous transactions to the proper authorities, affected merchants, and concerned banks.

In an official statement, the CCAP referred to the modus operandi of Flores and Ragojos as “skimming” whereby information stored on the magnetic strips of debit, credit, or ATM cards is stolen and transferred to “dummy” cards. This nefarious act is punishable by law, through R.A. 8484 or the Access Devices Regulation Act of 1998.

Any person found guilty under this law may be sentenced to imprisonment of not less than six years and fined up to P10,000 or twice the value of the money or goods obtained by the offender, whichever is greater.

“Credit card cloning can happen to anyone,” explained Annie P. del Mundo, chair of the board of CCAP and vice president of the Bank of the Philippine Islands’ (BPI) customer care, collection, and card fraud division.

Del Mundo offers this advice to the public: “It is our responsibility as card holders to be alert and to check our statements for any unrecognized charges. Skimming happens because people think it’s harmless. We must emphasize that there is no such thing as a victimless crime.”

CCAP stressed that the apprehension of Flores and Ragojos will impress upon other architects of organized crime that the organization is capable of detecting fraudulent behavior, and will file the appropriate charges in order to protect the interests of merchants, issuing banks, and individual cardholders.

From my stand, CCAP, the police, and the concerned merchant should be given due recognition for their vigilance and untiring efforts.

And while we are on the subject, we might as well take up a relevant development with respect to the interest on billings charged to credit cards. This concerns a ruling handed down by the Supreme Court, through Associate Justice Presbiterio Velasco, on a case involving a BPI credit card holder, which generated conflicting reports.

In that particular case, Associate Justice Velasco imposed an interest ceiling of 2 percent interest per month or 24 percent interest per annum to be charged the card holder. As a result of that decision, some people had the mistaken impression that credit card companies, banks and other financial institutions cannot charge more than this rate of interest. The card holders were, therefore, demanding the same interest rate from their card companies.

In truth, the ruling penned by Associate Justice Velasco applies to that one particular case only, taking into consideration its unique set of circumstances and the specific conditions under which the decision was made. In other words, it would be an unfair generalization to say that this ruling covers all “banks and lending institutions, including those issuing credit cards.”

It has been clarified that this one particular case cannot be taken as the general rule that should apply to everyone, especially in light of the countless situations and factors that make one case different from another.

 What really transpired is that the Supreme Court did not direct BPI to lower its interest and penalty rates for all its customers, and it certainly did not direct all credit card companies to lower their interest and penalty rates as a whole. The Supreme Court directed BPI to lower its interest and penalty rates only in this individual case, based on the merits argued by the plaintiff.

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This is Breastfeeding Month. And the 20th anniversary of the Innocenti Declaration on the Protection, Promotion and Support of Breastfeeding. The declaration, says Vanessa Tobin, country representative of the UN children’s agency, UNICEF, outlines what countries need to do to protect, promote and support breastfeeding through its maternity hospitals.

UNICEF pushes for a breastfeeding culture in the Philippines, particularly for exclusive breastfeeding in the first six months of the child’s life. Exclusive breastfeeding means feeding the child with only mother’s milk and nothing else, not even water.

In 1991, UNICEF and the Word Health Organization launched the Baby-Friendly Hospital Initiative (BFHI) to ensure that all free standing and hospital maternities become centers of breastfeeding support.

A maternity facility is considered ‘baby-friendly’ when it does not accept free or low-cost breast milk substitutes, feeding bottles or teats, and has implemented Ten Steps to support successful breastfeeding.

These steps are: displaying policies at health facilities; training people to implement the policies; informing pregnant women about the benefits and management of breastfeeding; helping mothers initiate breastfeeding within one half-hour of birth; showing mothers how to breastfeed and maintain lactation; giving newborn infants no food or drink other than breast milk, unless medically indicated; practicing rooming-in, which allows mothers and infants to remain together 24 hours a day; encouraging breastfeeding on demand; giving no artificial teats or pacifiers; fostering the establishment of breast-feeding support groups, and referring mothers to them upon their discharge from the hospital or clinic.

Implementing these Ten Steps is critical in improving breastfeeding rates. More than 15,000 facilities in 134 countries have been awarded Baby-Friendly status since BFHI began. In Asia Thailand is one of 12 developing countries instituting such Ten Steps. China now has 6,000 baby-friendly hospitals, which saw breastfeeding rates rising dramatically from 29 percent to 68 percent in the mid 90s.

In unhappy contrast, in the Philippines, breastfeeding decreased from 37 percent in 1998 to 34 percent in 2003. “Use of milk formula and feeding bottles is still a problem,” says Tobin. “There is much to be done to reverse the effect of bottle feeding and intensive work is necessary to make exclusive breastfeeding the norm in society.”

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 My column last week quoted at length a piece which advised President Aquino to listen to the expertise and experience of scientists as he draws up his development program for the Philippines. I wrote that the author was broadcast journalist Flor Lacanilao, who is actually a retired professor of marine science at the University of the Philippines in Diliman. Flor’s cousins, Mike and Luke Lacalinao are the evangelists/broadcast journalists.

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My e-mail: [email protected]