Fighting scammers on the phone
On the last post, it was discussed that there was still some scams that are often perpetrated over the phone. These scams are new forms of phishing which authorities now label as ‘vhishing’ since voice is now used instead of e-mails. These calls are often made in order to gain the financial information of consumers. Now here is another example that was posted over at MSN.com regarding a case of this form of ‘phishing’.
It was reported that the customers of Santa Barbara Bank and Trust were told in an e-mail that their online accounts were all disabled due to the unauthorized access attempts on the system. At the same email, the customers of the bank were given a local California number where they can call and arrange the issue. And those customers who made a call to the local California number were asked to provide their account information. With this kind of set-up, those scammers have now access to the account numbers of the bank customers.
On the same article, money-transfer service provider PayPal also experienced some issues and experienced the same attack right after the incident at Santa Barbara. This time another email was used and claimed that the PayPal account of one PayPal consumer was compromised. The consumer was then directed to dial and contact an 805 area code number and the consumer was welcomed to a voice-over that said, ‘welcome to account verification’. The consumer was then asked for his 16 digit card number. The issue here is that PayPal would never send emails to their customers if their accounts are compromised and the company will not also ask the consumers to follow a certain link and call a number in a response to an email. It will be the company who will call the consumers if the account was compromised.
