I was tricked by a phone-phisher pretending to be from my bank, and he convinced me to hand over my credit-card number, then did $8,000+ worth of fraud with it before I figured out what happened.
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When a fraud department calls you, you don’t need to provide any more information than your name and yes/no answers. If they are asking for any additional information, tell them that you don’t trust their authenticity and that you’ll call the number on the credit card. A legitimate agent will politely end the conversation there.
Then you better call that number on the card quickly.
This is the solution.
Had this happen once, followed those steps, and the CSR was very interested in getting the details of the call. They put a freeze on that account for a bit as well. Nothing was taken.
True for any company asking for anything sensitive.
I’ve gotten scams from my internet provider asking me if I want to upgrade my plan with a new discount. Caller ID was spoofed and it sounded pretty legit, until they started asking me about my current plan tier and price. I was like “uh, you tell me. You’re the one with access to my account info.” After they hemmed and hawed about that, I just hung up.
Honestly, you should be suspicious of ANY incoming calls at this point. There are convincing scams that spoof the voices of people you actually know using trained AI. It’s actually pretty easy to do now, since you only need a few seconds of audio to use as a training sample. Anyone who’s ever posted a video with their voice on social media can potentially have their voice spoofed. I’ve warned my family about this, since most of us have our voice out there somewhere.
Phone calls are dumb. SMS is dumb. Phone numbers are dumb. Phone line security is basically non-existent. It’s wild that phone numbers have become the de facto ID on the internet; almost everything requires SMS auth to register now. PHONE NUMBERS ARE NOT PERSONAL IDS.
The worst thing imo is when a form will say they need to verify your identity, so they ask you to give them a phone number you can receive a text at to do a 2fa.
…how, exactly, does that verify anything other than that I own access to a phone number that can receive a text?
An unanswered phone is a happy phone.
Moss seal of approval.
They should already have your name too if they’re calling you
Props to him for talking about it. A lot of people get too embarrassed to tell anyone they got scammed. The reality is that phishing works on a ton of people and we should avoid shaming the victims. Everyone’s acts like they’re a digital security expert until their credit card gets stolen.
Told a family member the same when she almost got tricked by a scammer & called me to see if it was legit. They wouldn’t try it if it wasn’t convincing enough to catch people in the scam to make it worth their time to do this crime instead of some other.
I hadn’t given [the scammer] the last four digits of my card.
Wait a sec.
He hadn’t asked for the last four digits. He’d asked for the last seven digits. At the time, I’d found that very frustrating, but now – “The first nine digits are the same for every card you issue, right?” I asked the VP.
I’d given him my entire card number.
Huh. I hadn’t realized the institution prefix was so long.
My rule of thumb is to never give away any information, always call back. And I don’t have credit cards, never have, whenever I need I just use virtual disposable CCs from my banking system.
Anything that requires any personal info from me needs to come in the form of a physical letter. I do not give out anyone over the phone. Emails are not legally binding.
Never, ever, ever, ever volunteer personal information, for any reason, on a call you did not initiate, with a number you haven’t verified from a trusted source, like a brick and mortar branch, or your online banking account.
He said someone in the bank’s supply chain was compromised, as they knew a lot of details that should have been known only to the bank. Also that the only information he gave away were the last digits of a card number.
No, he gave away the last seven.
When a possible fraud department calls you, you shouldn’t need to verify any digits of the card. Answer only yes or no.
Call them back if you need to give additional information.
I’ve never had a legitimate contact from a fraud department that wasn’t an automated message stating to call the number on the card. I’ve never had a human call me to initiate a live discussion.
You say that, but I’ve had my credit card call me about a charge and the information they asked was too specific. I hung up and called the official number and they confirmed it was indeed true and didn’t understand why I thought the way they did it was a scam.
It’s scary how oblivious banks can be, and I think Brokkr is either lucky or optimistic about their procedures - I have seen even large banks like HSBC make “facepalm” mistakes like you described, and it sounds like Cory’s much smaller credit union might even have outsourced their nighttime call handling to someone very close to the fraudsters.
Still curious how they managed to use Cory’s card with just the card number and not the CVC2 code - is that a regional thing where some online shops aren’t required to use it?
Right? This is the bare bones basic right here.
Hold on the scammer could spend 8000 usd without even knowing the card’s PIN number?
It’s a credit card, they don’t typically have pins like debit cards do. They do have a 3 digit CVC code on the back, but 3 digits is pretty easy to get just by brute force guessing.
Three digits is not that easy to get by brute force. It’ll be locked for fraud pretty quickly.
However the CVV is usually only required for card-not-present purchases. One way around that is to imprint the number onto their own magstripe card and run it as a card-present transaction.
The real answer here is to have decent digital ID as 2-factor authentication.
This scam would be practically impossible in Sweden with BankID for example.
Adding multiple factors to authentication just adds another step to the scam, it doesn’t make it impossible by any means.
For BankID it somewhat does, because only registered services can make the request - so they’d need to register a scam service and then use that. Which also makes it an easier job for anti-fraud police.
So it’d be a lot more complicated.
Like obviously at a certain point if someone is willing to do everything they can - then they will be scammed, see this for example: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-leeds-67208755
But the more steps there are, the higher the chance the person realises it is a scam.
He gave them his CC number over the phone. How would Sweden’s BankID protect against that?
More that you’d never need to provide it, but many transactions will also require 2FA, even by the credit card.
Lol an entire article about someone giving away info that should never be given away.
Call your bank back if they start requesting info. shakes head
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I know I can’t get scammed. This isn’t an idle claim, but seeing as it is impossible to prove, we can just leave it at that
