How should you react if someone from a company calls to tell you that your personal details, for example, may have been compromised? It makes sense that you would take a call like this seriously. After all, you don’t want strangers accessing your personal data. Scammers try to use this fear to their advantage. They call you with a fabricated story from a number that seems to belong to a company you use. In this article, we’ll explain how you can recognise help desk fraud.
Cases of attempted help desk fraud have risen in recent months. Scammers call people, posing as help desk staff from large, well-known companies. In the case of bank help desk fraud, you may be called by someone pretending to work at the bank. The scammers search online for the name of a real ABN AMRO employee, which they then use to make the call. So if you check the name online, you’ll probably assume that you are talking to a real bank employee.
Scammers call from a fake number. They use a trick that generates the real number of the bank on your telephone screen. In other words, you see the bank’s actual number on your screen.
During the call, the fake employee tells you about an urgent problem that needs to be resolved. They ask you to take action right away. Sometimes, they’ll mention personal details such as your address, account number or date of birth. It seems as if they know a lot about you, which makes their story even more convincing.
But these scammers have usually got their hands on your details illegally, by hacking the website of an online store, for example, or through a data breach. So there’s nothing you can do to stop yourself being approached by a scammer.
Ireen Lammerts, Security Consultant at ABN AMRO: “The fact that the scammer seems to know a lot about you makes help desk fraud even more convincing. It’s important to remember that in practice, you would never be asked to do the things that scammers ask you to do: an ABN AMRO employee would never ask you to transfer money, disclose your security codes or click a link to log in directly to Internet Banking or the ABN AMRO app.”
In the case of bank help desk fraud, the urgent problem usually concerns suspicious transactions on your current account, but these transactions are made up. It’s just a way for the scammer to convince you to take action quickly. The scammer will urge you to secure your money, usually by transferring it to a ‘safe account’. This is a trick of course; there’s no such thing as a ‘safe account’.
ABN AMRO would never ask you to transfer money. Nor would we ask you to disclose your security codes. So never share this information, and never transfer money at the request of a bank employee. You may receive a text message instead of a phone call, but even then, we never send links for you to log in directly to Internet Banking or the ABN AMRO app.
There’s no harm in listening for a minute or two if your bank or a company calls you. We might be calling because we’re missing few of your personal details, or we want to know what you think of our services. But you should always be critical, especially when you’re being pressurised into taking action. If you’re in any doubt, or think that you’re dealing with a scammer, end the call and look up the company’s telephone number yourself. Then call back and wait until you have an employee on the line who can verify whether the story checks out. You’ll find all the ABN AMRO telephone numbers you need here.
If you’ve been scammed, make sure you report it to us right away. And we’d advise reporting it to the police too. If you’ve had a call from a fake employee but haven’t transferred any money, there’s no need to worry. But it’s important to be aware of all the different types of scams and how to recognise fraud.
