Some banks could be leaving their customers vulnerable to spoofing scams, according to a Which? investigation. Spoofing is a tactic used by fraudsters in which they impersonate legitimate companies by forging the name or number that an email, call or text appears to be from.
It means that when victims are hit by such attacks, they can appear to be from genuine companies. To make it harder for fraudsters to do this, companies can sign up to regulator Ofcom’s Do Not Originate (DNO) list – a shared resource with telecoms providers to help them identify and block calls likely to be spoofed.
To test how effective banks were at protecting their customers, Which? made calls to a test phone, spoofing the prominent numbers of 14 current account providers. Firms’ numbers were chosen if they were the ones printed on the back of debit cards or listed as fraud helplines on their websites.
