Many customers have had their accounts siphoned off by this new scam, where cybercriminals pose as bank advisers.
Through ThePoint.fr
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HASWith this method, your bank account can be completely emptied in a matter of moments. The “vishing”, contraction of voice and phishing, therefore phishing by voice, as underlined The Parisian, is a new and growing form of scam. The method is always the same: a person pretends to be a bank adviser, and in impeccable French will gain the confidence of his interlocutor. He will, for example, present him with confidential data that theoretically only the bank of the future victim may possess. He will then explain to him that someone is taking money from his accounts, and that he can help him. The goal: to obtain, among other things, the identification codes for the bank application.
In reality, the cybercriminal will have bought “on the Dark Web or on encrypted Telegram messaging the complete profile of the victim with his telephone number and his bank details”, according to Dany Da Silva, cybersecurity expert at Bitdefender. Cost of the operation for the scammer: between 3 and 20 euros for a credit card number, between 80 and 120 euros for bank details. Behind, he will be able to recover up to several tens of thousands of euros.
Jean-Jacques Latour, director of cybersecurity expertise at Cybermalveillance.gouv.fr, explains to our colleagues that they “often operate on weekends or Friday evenings to avoid any checks with your bank”.
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Victims of all profiles
“This growing scam also affects all profiles: informed young people, more fragile people, even bank agents or personalities like the former IMF boss, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, and Michel Drucker”, underlines Jean-Jacques Latour.
For this “vishing” to work, “You need behind a mafia structure capable of making automatic calls and mobilizing French-speaking interlocutors en masse”, analyzes Dany Da Silva. Europol recently dismantled one of these sites, which had made 10 million fraudulent calls, recalls The Parisian.
The victims are not at the end of their sentences: most banks refuse to reimburse them after the scam. This earned a complaint from UFC-Que Choisir for “misleading commercial practice”. The French Banking Federation recalls, “that a bank adviser will never ask a customer to communicate his personal information linked to his account, whether by telephone, SMS or email”.
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