by Rod Hughes

Costa Rica’s banks should stand behind deposits in cases where money is stolen by hackers but the victim has not given out any personal information, says Jorge Rojas, chief of OIJ, the local equivalent of Scotland Yard or the FBI.

Although far from common, this crime has cost depositors in Costa Rican banks tens of thousands of dollars, Rojas says, adding that it is time those banks guarantee accounts. Civil attorney Fernando Montero, consulted by the newspaper La Nacion, agrees with Rojas.

“If a bank has a weak security system, I’d look for another bank or hide my money under the mattress,” Montero says. “If the technology of the bank lags behind that of the hackers, the bank is negligent,” he added.

In the past, the law has been unclear about this. Some decades ago, a falsified check on the account of a local company resulted in a loss of several thousand dollars. The nationalized bank refused to reimburse the company, although the theft was accomplished with the obvious collusion of a bank employee.

La Nacion cited a recent case in point, that of Geraldo Salazar, a Costa Rican living in California, who found that $20,000 had been electronically removed from his Banco de Costa Rica account on Oct. 22 by unknown hackers. “The bank should have noted that the transactions weren’t normal,” he said, “My computers in the United States are protected. I contracted a company to do a scan and they proved (my machines) weren’t vulnerable. I didn’t even answer an e-mail.”

Consulted by the paper, lawyer Henry Vega agrees with Montero, using rather unique logic: If the court held Banco Nacional at Monteverde responsible for the security of its clients massacred in an armed robbery, then this should apply to cybertheft as well.

The Consumer law states, “The producer, supplier and the merchant must answer concurrently and independently to the existence of blame if the customer is injured by the good or service.” Whether this principle can be applied to cybertheft has yet to be tested in court. The country’s judges often take an extremely literal view of the law.