In May 2025, Jamaica witnessed its largest cyber-enabled heist to date. Two deposit-taking institutions (DTIs) reported a fraud ring that exploited outdated POS terminals running in offline mode, siphoning over JMD 400 million before the breach was detected. It was a theft executed not through brute force but through a weakness baked quietly into the system, the kind of loophole that feels harmless until it's weaponised.

Meanwhile, the Bank of Jamaica’s March 2025 fraud report confirmed a broader, equally unsettling trend. Fraud losses reached J$1.73 billion in the most recent audited cycle. Cheque fraud alone surged fivefold to J$401 million, now accounting for nearly a quarter of industry fraud losses. 

These are not isolated incidents. They are symptoms of a broader shift where cyber threats and traditional money-laundering techniques are converging, creating new vulnerabilities for financial institutions of every size. 

Fixing the Card Machines 

The May 2025 theft was possible because criminals took advantage of POS terminals still operating in offline mode meaning the machines weren’t verifying transactions with the bank in real time. That tiny feature, once a convenience for merchants, has become a structural vulnerability. Leaving POS terminals able to process transactions without checking authorisation in real time is equivalent to leaving the vault unlocked because “it’s easier for staff.” The solution isn’t complicated. If a terminal cannot stay online reliably, it should not be deployed. And if a bank cannot guarantee real-time verification, it cannot guarantee the integrity of its payments. 

Moving Away from Paper Cheques 

Cheque fraud tells a similar story. Jamaica’s cheque ecosystem has survived longer than many expected, held in place by habit more than necessity. But the cost of that nostalgia is rising. Paper instruments are slow to verify, simple to manipulate, and increasingly incompatible with a digital economy. Paper-based payments have outlived their original purpose and have now become the least secure instrument in the financial toolkit. While institutions should continue strengthening validation controls in the short term, the longer-term solution is to accelerate the migration to secure digital payments. 

Digital transfers come with encryption, audit trails, and authentication by design, all of which reduce the risk that a forged signature or manipulated instrument will slip through unnoticed. 

Working Together 

But fixing terminals and retiring cheques only gets us part of the way there. The deeper issue is organisational. Financial institutions still tend to operate in silos: IT over here, AML over there, fraud somewhere in between. Each team sees only a slice of the whole. Yet the adversaries exploiting our systems operate with a unified view. They understand the pressure points across channels, devices, authentication gaps, and manual processes. They use cyber signals to commit fraud, fraud techniques to bypass cyber controls, and move between systems far more fluidly than institutions are often structured to respond. And because institutional teams report separately, the full pattern often goes unnoticed until it becomes a headline. 

This is why internal collaboration is becoming just as important as technology. Jamaican banks need to break down the walls between their IT security teams (the computer experts) and their fraud teams (the money experts). Cybersecurity teams need visibility into payment anomalies.

AML teams need to be alerted the moment a suspicious device or session pattern emerges. The entire lifecycle of a financial crime event, from device compromise to transaction flow, must be understood as a single system.

The threats are not new, but the way they manifest has changed. Jamaica’s financial sector has the tools, intelligence, and now the regulatory momentum needed to modernise its defences. What it needs next is integration. The future requires a joint model that understands criminals will exploit whichever gap is easiest. Our job is to make those gaps harder to find. 

We know where the weak spots are. We have the technology to fix them. Now, we need to get it done. 

If your organisation is reassessing its resilience and rethinking how cyber and AML should operate in 2026, Symptai can help you identify gaps and design an integrated approach that aligns people, processes, and technology. Schedule a Consultation Session.