During the quarantine period, there activated the phone fraudsters that use social engineering technologies to find out Bank customers’ personal data.

The Agency of the Republic of Kazakhstan for Financial Market Regulation and Development has published a detailed material on this type of scam on the Fingramota.kz website.

Vishing is one of the most common ways to steal funds from customers’ accounts. Scammers call borrowers, posing as employees of well-known banks, while they deftly fake the phone numbers from which they call. This can be a short number of a bank’s call center – modern technologies allow you to do this without much effort.  However, the scammers themselves may be located in another city or even in another country.

Financial scammers use these tricks for one purpose – to lure out the victim’s personal data. This is the IIN, payment card or account data, CVV / CVC code, or a code from an SMS message. After that, hackers can cash out all the funds on a card or an account.

1. Better to break off a conversation impolitely than to politely inform a PIN-code to the card.

Even the old proven scammer methods flawlessly. The easiest fraud:  a wannabe bank employee calling. It alarmingly informs you that someone is trying to make a transaction on your card. If it is not you, you need to urgently provide the caller with all your card information. In this case, it is better to immediately stop the conversation and hang up.

We remind you that a bank employee will never request this information and will not be the first to call. To make sure that financial fraudsters have contacted you, you need to call the Bank where you are served, but in no case to the number from which the call was received.

2. Do not rush to disclose your data to the first caller, a bank already knows them.

A real bank manager does not need to call you to clarify your last name, passport details, which cards were issued, and how much money is left on them. A bank has your full financial file, t. i. your credit history. Therefore, bank employees will never contact you by phone with these questions. This information is only valuable to scammers.

Remember that banks never call themselves to ask customers by phone: a full card number; its expiration date; CVC/CVV; a username and a password to Internet banking; a code word, a code from an SMS message. The Bank can only request this information if you have called the Bank to resolve a certain issue. For example, you can unblock a card when traveling abroad, specify where you can pick up a reissued card, and so on.  If you get a call, and someone, posing as a Bank employee, requests such information, even if it needs to be dictated to the answering machine, you can be sure that they are scammers.

3. Do not panic if phone scammers try to scare you.

The best answer to a panicked statement that there is a serious problem with your card, “I will call or go to the bank to check it out in person.” Be sure, the caller will immediately disconnect. This is a very common trick to scare the cardholder. There can be invented different situations:

“Someone is conducting suspicious transactions on your card”;

“Urgent! The some amount of money has already been debited from your account/card. To save what is left, you need to transfer the money to a temporary account”;

“Did you apply for a loan five minutes ago? If not, we urgently need your data to cancel it”;

“Your card is blocked, in order to unblock it, you will receive an SMS to your phone that contains the code, say it”, etc. A scammer’s main goal is to scare you.

It is worth remembering that if there are any problems with your card, a bank can block it itself and will most likely send a notification about this via the channel specified in the agreement. It is best to call back to a bank outlet and find out whether they actually sent a notification.