A Banking Consultant has blamed the incessant increase of bank frauds in the country on the failure of banks to employ persons with integrity.

Dr Richmond Atuahene said banks are losing huge sums of money to fraudsters because they do not employ persons with integrity.

"The fact is that we're not checking people's integrity. We are not checking the people we employ. We are not doing due diligence on them and this is the problem," he said.

Speaking on Joy FM's Super Morning Show, he indicated that banks leave the duty of employing bankers to third parties who do not ensure that they employ persons with integrity and this he said was a major challenge the sector is faced with.

"Since the introduction of outsourcing of cash mobilisation or mobile banking, over the last five years, the tendency has been that the banks themselves do not themselves go and collect the cash.

"They outsource [employing staff] to third parties. Third parties who actually do not employ, I would say, competent but people with doubtful integrity, people with suspicious characters and all sort of characters," he said.

Banking fraud has been one of the major challenges the banking sector has been battling for years now.

A Bank of Ghana report revealed that banks lost ¢19.1 million to theft committed by its own employees in 2018.

Dr Atuahene said the problem still persists because banks do not ensure that they employ persons with integrity.

He further disclosed that some of these bankers manipulate figures of amounts supposed to be credited to customers account.

"So when they take the monies, possibly instead of crediting the accounts, they manipulate the figures; say instead of 1,000, they put in 100 and keep the 900," he said.

He advised customers to be vigilant and crosscheck bank transactions to see if everything is intact, adding that inconsistencies must immediately be reported.

"The point is that in these days, with the SMS alert, one would expect that if I see money in my account and it does not reflect the amount they took, I quickly come in, but unfortunately most of us are not doing what we call transaction monitoring," he said.