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More on vishing scams
Posted on Jul 17, 2006 by Tom Fragala
You will be hearing a lot about this scam. The “v” in vishing stands for Voice over IP. I blogged about it recently here. And the Wall Street Journal has an article today on vishing:
Customers of Santa Barbara Bank & Trust recently received emails telling them that their accounts with the company's online banking system had been disabled after the bank detected unauthorized access. They were told to dial a telephone number (with a local, Southern California area code) where an automated voice prompted them to enter their account numbers, personal-access codes and other details. It's not clear who was on the other end of the phone line, but it wasn't Santa Barbara Bank & Trust.
Now, vishing isn’t really a new scam, so much as a new way of executing an old scam (telephone solicitation to get account numbers). What makes it interesting is that they use email to contact people but rather than telling you in the message to click on a link (phishing), they tell you to call a number. People aren’t expecting a phone number to be bogus so they tend to trust it. And with new VOIP technology, it is very easy to route those calls, for almost no cost, to anywhere in the world. It’s really a clever new way of pretexting as much as anything else. The moral of the story is don’t trust a phone number sent to you in email either.
Tags: vishing
Filed under: Scams
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