Money Ukrainians who receive payment cards after Sept. 9 have better protection compared to other customers. On that day came into force NBU decree number 382, which banned banks to shift all the responsibility for the theft of money from the cards to their holders.
"Electronic means of payment user should not include terms and
conditions of the requirement of unconditional responsibility for the
inadequate translation, except if it is proved that the act or user
inactivity led to the loss of the User's means of payment, the
disclosure of
For owners of the existing 30.8 million active payment cards, this rule does not apply.
"Retroactive law is not", - said director of the department of payment
systems and innovative development of the NBU Sergei Shatsky. Banks are not planning to change the existing contracts.
"At the moment the contract of complex bank service Oschadbank does not
contain provisions on the unconditional responsibility of the user of a
payment card for committing fraudulent transactions on his account.
According to the contract, the customer is solely responsible for the
implementation of the fraudulent transactions on his account only if it
is established that he has disclosed his payment card data (number,
The new rules do not mean that customers will receive compensation in the event of any fraudulent card transactions. "User after discovery of the loss of electronic means of payment is obliged to immediately notify the Bank in the manner provided by the contract. Prior to the notification of the bank risk of loss from the transactions and the responsibility of the user, and the date of communication - the bank - said the director of Legal Affairs AltBanka Arsene Magpie. - In NBU decree it is only about the impossibility of laying the treaties on the use of electronic means of payment all liability for damages on payment cards on the client. But even if there is such a clause, including the contracts concluded prior to September 9, do not deprive the customer the right to claim money back from the banks for operations that are not carried out. "
evidence of guilt
Bankers believe that the actions of the holders of cards often become a cause of stealing money.
"The cases when fraudsters trick in Scouting cardholders necessary
data, which are then used for unauthorized transactions, primarily on
the Internet. I would like to remind all users of payment cards on the inadmissibility of disclosure
But customers are not worth much to worry about. "To prove the guilt of the client difficult, I would say that it is practically impossible. In my opinion, will help the exchange of information between banks, possibly as part of
fraud checks
To find out the cause of theft, banks are conducting an investigation, as the words of the client it is not enough.
"To investigate the requested documents on the transactions of retail
outlets, which were carried out the operation, requests are sent to the
acquiring bank; is an active interaction with other Ukrainian and European
Therefore, the new rule does not mean that the customer will be able to
receive compensation immediately after the theft of money. "In the case of unauthorized card transactions customer handling procedure in the bank remains unchanged. Only after an appropriate investigation, with the assistance of the international payment systems,
As the Democratic Party scrambles to assess the potential impact of another trove of internal documents leaked by the hacking entity calling itself “Guccifer 2.0,” the Democratic National Committee finds itself in a war of words with the Kremlin, whose spokesperson condemned what he called “blatant Russophobia” on display in the US presidential election.
The documents, made available online yesterday, were released along with a rambling statement from the hacker at a security conference in London yesterday. So far, it is unclear whether the massive trove of documents contains any seriously damaging information. As of Wednesday morning, reporters and activists plowing through them had identified information likely to be more annoying than dangerous -- like the personal cell phone numbers of Democratic officials including, apparently, vice presidential nominee Tim Kaine.
Related: Worried About Trump, GOP Donors Back Paul Ryan and His Congressional ‘Firewall’
But the Democratic National Committee took immediate steps to blame Russian “agents” for the hack -- an opinion supported by multiple computer security experts -- and to tie them tightly to Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.
“The DNC is the victim of a crime—an illegal cyber attack by Russian state-sponsored agents who seek to harm the Democratic Party and progressive groups in an effort to influence the presidential election,” said interim DNC Chair Donna Brazile in a prepared statement. “There’s one person who stands to benefit from these criminal acts, and that’s Donald Trump. Not only has Trump embraced Putin, he publicly encouraged further Russian espionage to help his campaign. Like so many of the words Trump has uttered this election season, his statements encouraging cyber crime are dangerous, divisive, and unprecedented.”
Brazile was referring to Trump’s repeated praise of Russian strongman Vladimir Putin, as well as his offhand suggestion earlier this summer that Russian hackers might be able to access emails that Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton had deleted from her controversial personal email server. In an interview that aired on Russian state-run network RT last week, Trump said that he doubted Russia was actually behind the attacks on the Democratic Party.
An earlier leak of DNC emails revealed that officials with the ostensibly neutral party committee were strong supporters of Clinton during the Democratic primary, enraging supporters of her opponent, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and forcing several resignations. Brazile is serving as interim DNC chair because former chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz was among those forced out by the previous leak.
Related: The Biggest Threat to the Economy? It Could Be the Election
On Tuesday, Brazile warned that whatever turns up in the latest leak might be false information planted by hackers. “Our legal team is now in the process of reviewing these private documents, and attempting to confirm their authenticity, as it is common for Russian hackers to forge documents.”
Russian officials have consistently denied any involvement in the attack on the DNC’s email servers. In an interview with Bloomberg earlier this month, Putin argued that the identity of the DNC hackers is unimportant.
“Listen, does it even matter who hacked this data?” he said. “The important thing is the content that was given to the public.”
However, on Wednesday, in his daily call with reporters, Kremlin spokesman Dimitry Peskov took a more aggressive tone, apparently in response to Brazile’s statement.
Related: Trump -- The Fed Is Conspiring Against Me
“We state that the ‘Russian card’ and the ‘card’ of our president at times becomes the deciding factor in the US electoral process. It would be much nicer if this card played a positive role," Peskov said Wednesday during his daily conference call with reporters. “Unfortunately, we see continued displays of often hard-core Russophobia. We can only express regret in this regard." He added, "This rhetoric, which is being formulated in electoral campaign style... is unlikely to help fledgling, fragile attempts to build at least some sort of mutual trust."
He seemed to be referring to an emerging arrangement between the US and Russia around a ceasefire in Syria, where the two nations have a common foe in the terror group ISIS but are supporting different factions that are also fighting each other.
Russian media also took exception to comments President Obama made while campaigning for Clinton on Tuesday. The president criticized Trump’s praise of Putin’s popularity in Russia and compared him to deceased Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.
“Saddam Hussein had a 90 percent poll rating. If you control the media and you've taken away everybody's civil liberties and you jail dissidents, that's what happens,” Obama said.
The last time Russia’s sole aircraft carrier sailed into the Mediterranean Sea, five years ago, the U.S. Navy’s 6th Fleet kept a close eye on its progress. The concern among American officers wasn’t the ship’s contingent of fighter planes; instead, it was the very real worry it would sink and necessitate a potentially risky rescue operation.
The 26-year-old Admiral Kuznetsov made it through that 2011 deployment without sinking and is now headed back to the eastern Mediterranean this fall as part of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s effort to use Syria as a showcase for his new model military. But the earlier worries were plenty valid: On a 2009 Mediterranean transit, one sailor died when the vessel caught fire, and the ship accidentally dumped tons of fuel into the sea in a refueling mishap. And those accidents aren’t outliers. The problems with the ship are so widespread, and so expected, that the flattop has to be shadowed by tugs to tow it to port when it predictably breaks down.
But now the Kuznetsov has a slate of different objectives in mind. The ship will begin launching airstrikes on behalf of the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, a Russian ally. It will be the carrier’s first-ever combat deployment and the first combat test of its MiG-29K fighter jets. It will also offer the first and perhaps best chance to showcase the carrier-based fighters’ capabilities to potential clients such as India, which already operates a Russian-built carrier and which has purchased dozens of MiG-29s over the last decade.
The Kuznetov’s deployment comes just as Russia has carved out an increasingly prominent role in the Syria crisis. Last week, a year after Moscow started military operations there, the United States and Russia reached a deal on a cease-fire that, if it holds, could ground the Syrian air force and bring humanitarian relief to besieged cities. Russia’s whole Syrian adventure is, in many ways, a bid to re-create lost Soviet influence in the eastern Mediterranean, which reached its high-water mark in the early 1970s, in no small part due to the Soviet navy’s strength in the region.
Deploying an operational aircraft carrier, no matter how star-crossed, makes Russia a member of an exclusive club: The only other countries with big-deck naval aviation capability today are the United States, France, and, to a limited extent, China. (Plenty of countries have smaller ships that can launch some aircraft, but those aren’t full-sized aircraft carriers.)
“If you’d asked anybody following the Russian military just before they deployed to Syria, they would have said, ‘Russians can’t do expeditionary warfare because they can’t support it,’” said Dmitry Gorenburg, a senior research scientist at CNA. “But they’ve been very inventive. We’re not going to be as quick to dismiss them after this.”
The Kremlin, painfully aware of the carrier’s spotty history, seems to be playing things safe, with one military source telling TASS that the ship will stick close to Syria’s coastline “so that the deck aircraft have enough fuel to complete the military tasks and return back.”
There’s a good reason for that: The Kuznetsov lacks the catapults found on American and French carriers that shoot jets off the short decks at high speed. Instead, the Russian ship — like India’s and China’s first carriers — features a “ski jump” lift at the bow to help planes get airborne. That kind of deck means the planes, about 15 Su-33 and MiG-29s, have to fly light, with smaller loads of fuel and half-empty bomb racks. The 10 Nimitz–class carriers in the U.S. Navy, such as the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, currently in the Middle East launching strikes on the Islamic State, can carry at least 60 aircraft and launch them with full fuel and bomb loads.
The decision to dispatch a limping ship with a one-armed air wing shows that Moscow is just “flexing muscles,” one senior U.S. defense official told Foreign Policy. The Russians already have strike aircraft near Latakia, on the Syrian coast, from where they have been launching operations for the last year. Another dozen-odd planes launching unguided bombs on short flights from the deck of the Kuznetsov won’t add much punch to their efforts.
The U.S. official compared the carrier’s deployment to Russia’s use of cruise missiles last fall when the country began its air war in Syria. It’s “for effect, for show,” he said, mostly to prove that Russia is a global military power with the capacity to strike targets from offshore.
And with the 55,000-ton carrier scheduled to go into dry dock in early 2017 for a long-awaited two-year overhaul, this fall looks like Moscow’s one shot to demonstrate the operational capabilities of the carrier and its new strike fighter.
India, at least, will be paying attention. The Soviet-built Indian carrier INS Vikramaditya and the INS Vikrant (being built in an Indian shipyard) both use Russian MiG-29Ks, but the Indian government has a long list of complaints over the performance of the aircraft. New Delhi shelled out $2.2 billion for 45 fighters in 2004 and 2010, but the planes have suffered a litany of problems, from faulty engines to poor flight availability, and the government has pushed back hard against Moscow.
Part of the problem has been the manufacturing process. Ukraine has banned all defense-related exports to Russia, and American and European Union sanctions have also bitten into the Russian military manufacturing base, forcing India to buy some of the components itself and add them to the aircraft once they arrive at their base in Goa.
A successful combat deployment of the Russian MiG-29s might assuage some of India’s concerns, once it sees what the plane can do in action.
And there might be more Russia-India deals in the future. This year, the Krylov State Research Centre, a Russian shipbuilding institute, held talks with New Delhi about eventually buying a version of Moscow’s future nuclear-powered carrier, known as Project 23000E. The Russians are up against the French, who are also attempting to woo the Indians; French shipbuilders have recently landed huge contracts for new submarines with New Delhi and Canberra.
Russian visions of future sugar plum fairies will have to wait, though. Right now, the Kuznetsov sits champing at the bit in port at Murmansk, undergoing repairs and final preparations for deployment. Its air wing, meanwhile, sits on dry land in Crimea, practicing on a landing pad built to simulate the sloping deck of the ship they’ll soon join.
Photo credit: TASS via Getty Images
MANILA, Philippines (AP) — A former Filipino militiaman testified before the country's Senate on Thursday that President Rodrigo Duterte, when he was still a city mayor, ordered him and other members of a liquidation squad to kill criminals and opponents in gangland-style assaults that left about 1,000 dead.
Edgar Matobato, 57, told the nationally televised Senate committee hearing that he heard Duterte order some of the killings and acknowledged he himself carried out about 50 of the abductions and deadly assaults, including a man who they fed to a crocodile in 2007 in southern Davao city.
The Senate committee inquiry was being led by Sen. Leila de Lima, a staunch critic of Duterte's anti-drug campaign that has left more than 3,000 suspected drug users and dealers dead since he assumed the presidency in June. Duterte has accused de Lima of involvement in illegal drugs, alleging that she used to have a driver who took money from detained drug lords. She has denied the allegations.
The hearing was briefly halted so senators could discuss how to provide security for Matobato because of the explosive nature of his allegations.
"Our job was to kill criminals like drug pushers, rapists, snatchers," Matobato said under oath, adding some of the targets were not criminals but opponents of Duterte and one of his sons in Davao city.
Presidential spokesman Martin Andanar rejected the allegations, saying government investigations into Duterte's time as mayor of Davao had already gone nowhere because of a lack of real evidence.
There was no immediate reaction from Duterte, who has denied any role in extra-judicial killings when he was the longtime mayor of Davao and after he assumed the presidency in June.
Matobato said the victims in Davao allegedly ranged from petty criminals to people associated with Duterte's political opponents, and included a wealthy businessman who was killed in central Cebu province because of a feud with Duterte's son over a woman.
Some of the victims were shot and dumped on Davao streets or buried in three unmarked graves, he said, adding some were disposed of in the sea with their stomachs cut open so they would not float and would be eaten by fish right away.
"They were killed like chickens," said Matobato, who added he backed away from the killings after feeling guilty and entered a government witness-protection program.
He left the program when Duterte became president, fearing he would be killed.