The Police warn of a new fraud with sending SMS and phone calls impersonating banks

The National Police has focused on an elaborate form of bank fraud in which, by sending false SMS and calls posing as the entity, criminals access the accounts of the victims. The advice of the authorities, as they often repeat in these cases: hang up and call the bank’s contact number directly.

The deception begins with this message: “We have detected suspicious access attempts to your account. You must activate your web security system or your account will be blocked ».

With this hook, it is explained from the General Directorate of the Police, cybercriminals call their victims to report suspicious movements in their account, pretending to be employees of the financial institution. Faced with this situation, the agents are clear: in case of doubt about the authenticity of the call received, you have to hang up and call the bank’s contact number directly.

Although the messages may present certain variations, they always include a link to access the bank directly, which, however, leads to a false page where they ask for bank and personal information, your username and password to access online banking and a telephone number. contact. They also warn their victims that they will receive a call to perform the appropriate security checks.

Bank phone number

With personal data in their possession, cybercriminals call their victims posing as employees of their entity and even sometimes the legitimate phone number of the bank may appear on the mobile screen. It is not. This is a “mask” that hides the real number from which the call is made.

Criminals inform the victim that there are suspicious movements in their account and ask for their electronic signature keys. To give more credibility to the deception, they can issue new SMS informing of the alleged steps they are taking or simulate that they are transferring the calls to other departments.

An elaborate process with which they get access to the Internet banking of their victims and can make payments and transfers while maintaining communication with the scammed, from whom they request the necessary keys to authorize the operations.

Faced with this fraud, the Police once again recalls: «The first rule that we must not forget is that secret keys or personal data should never be provided through any channel».

It explains that financial institutions can communicate with their clients if they need any verification, but they will never request secret keys, bank details or sign retrocessions of operations.

And make it clear: in case of doubt, it is best to hang up and call the bank through the contact number used regularly.

The agents ask to be especially cautious with the text messages or emails that we receive and pay attention to the links they include, since in cases of fraud it never redirects to the official website of the entity, and they usually contain misspellings or missing phrases of meaning.

Another effective measure is not to access network services that require the exchange of private information or carry out banking procedures from public devices or that are connected to public Wi-Fi networks.

In case of receiving SMS with these characteristics, The Police reminds that you should not provide any data or access the links it contains or download attachments.