The head of fraud at a leading bank has urged people in Northern Ireland to get tough on the scammers who are targeting their bank balances.
While banks constantly have to deal with personal and business customers being targeted by scams, Danske Bank has highlighted a recent case in which one of their customers was targeted.
The customer recorded a six-minute conversation with a fraudster who was pretending to be from the bank in early January.
"The customer's mobile phone recorded the call between himself and the scammer," Chris Wynne, Head of Financial Crime Prevention at Danske Bank told Belfast Live.
"It was something that we have never come across before in terms of the end-to-end journey, which ultimately led to fraud. The call was quite revealing and it shows how easy it is for a criminal to win the trust and assurance of their victim, which ultimately then led to unauthorised transactions being attempted.
"Bank impersonation scams are not new and there are a massive number of them doing the rounds at the moment. Our colleagues in other banks are being absolutely inundated with them.
"However thanks to this customer, people have now got a unique insight into the techniques criminals are using to socially engineer their victims into handing over personal information."
Chris says criminals often know what bank their victims use from information obtained earlier in the process, usually by the victim responding to a phishing email or smishing message.
"This recent scam couldn't have been successful without information already given away. What many people don't realise is that in these types of situations, the call is the second part of the scam. The first part was the customer responding to a fake text message claiming to be from a courier company or even NHS track and trace.
"Smishing in particular has exploded in the last two years with text messages purporting to be from delivery companies or relating to Covid passports or vaccinations an increasingly common method of gathering rich information for criminals to then reuse.
"By clicking on the attached link in these messages, that takes a customer through to a genuine looking website, which is asking for a small amount of money that many people then pay.
"Of course the fraudsters aren't looking for any money, it's all about retrieving more information such as your name and address etc as the only details they have when they first contacted you was your mobile number.
"If a customer responds to the message, they will know the potential victims personal and bank details and can then make the call pretending to be from a bank."
Chris ddded: "As a bank, we are constantly working to detect and prevent fraudulent activity but with the number of attempted frauds and scams escalating, keeping our customers up-to-date on the latest fraud and scams is essential."
The recording is available to listen to here.
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