ROSE HALL, St James — President of the Montego Bay Chamber of Commerce and Industry Jason Russell is urging small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to seek external support in boosting cybersecurity and protecting their assets.

“You can’t just take up security and collecting money and people’s data by yourselves,” Russell cautioned.

He was speaking during National Commercial Bank’s SME Connect that was held at Hilton Resort and Spa in Montego Bay Tuesday evening.

Russell, who also runs the popular Pier One eatery and watering hole in the western city, was part of a fireside chat during which he shared lessons learned about doing business online while the COVID-19 pandemic raged.

“We started a kerb-side side business that we used to do maybe $10,000 a day in sales. It wasn’t efficient, it wasn’t anything to mention,” he disclosed.

“During COVID, we saw that going up to $200,000, $300,000, $400,000 a day. We bought a software that could allow people to order online and print the cooking instructions in the kitchen; no interactions with anybody — cutting edge,” Russell said.

However, he said they soon realised something was wrong, despite the uptick in sales.

“It was doing well and then we started to get scammed, and we started to employ different [corrective] measures; we tried a lot of things,” Russell remarked.

“One of the things we did was that we started an Excel sheet that would try and catch the anomalies of who ordering what; what they would do is get the delivery and hijack the delivery,” he added.

The Excel sheet helped but it was not enough.

“We ended up having to shut it down and we ended up having to go to a third party. That’s the lesson we learned from that: that a lot of it you can’t do by yourself,” he declared.

The chamber president pointed out that the third-party company’s experience and expertise made it better suited to handle the challenges Pier One was facing online and help his team do a better job in the virtual space.

“They’ll take the secure payment now and then pass that on to us directly to our bank accounts. We learned the hard way that cybersecurity is not SME function, you need to hire people that understand it and who know [what they are doing],” he said.

He explained that for smaller companies the focus is usually on service and product delivery and there is less time for things like cyber-protection, which gets more sophisticated by the day.

“It’s a cat and mouse thing, it’s the cops and robbers, they’re always changing the game, and we are busy making burgers and chicken; we don’t have time to be up-to-date with the new scam and the new forms of protection,” Russell said.

Fellow panellist Dane Nicholson, who is head of fraud prevention at NCB, also highlighted other threats that SMEs face when doing business.

“I know a lot of persons do transactions on the Amazon, the Temu and the Shein but what the fraudsters are doing now, they are setting up websites that look just like those to target SME customers who order big supplies out of China,” he warned.

“When you go on those websites to order, [for] some stuff, yes, you are going to get what you order on the website. But what the fraudsters are going to do, they are going to capture your personal information — your credit card number, your expiry date, your CVV, the mailing address, shipping address and all those personal information that you use to communicate with your supplier — and then use it against you in the very near future either to carry out wire fraud [or otherwise],” he added.

Nicholson urged SMEs who need support to reach out to NCB.