I saw this on Twitter. I can not verify its accuracy, but it sounds possible and offers a good piece of advice so I decided to share it.
https://twitter.com/WWNLennyLeonard/status/15172119306115727…
The gist is criminals can mimic your bank’s customer service or fraud hotline phone numbers, and they send you an alert asking if a charge that has been made is legit. When you reply to the text, they call you on a spoofed phone number that appears to be from your bank. Then they ask you to verify your personal info.
The remedy is to never provide info to someone who calls you. End the phone call with them, and call the bank using ONLY the phone number on the back of the card not on any number they might have given to you.
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When you reply to the text,
My phones are 30-40 years old. They don’t do “text”, nor do they show the calling party’s number, spoofed or not.
Steve…doesn’t answer the darn thing anyway, keeps the ringer turned off
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Whenever you have an inkling that it might be a scam, check the URLs in the email,
Tips and tools to check links in emails without clicking
The simple answer to this is to hover over any obscured link. The pop-up window will show you exactly where it’s looking you to go. If it is an exact destination you know, then you can trust it a little more, but not 100%. Eg. https:// pay-pal.com is a completely different destination to https:// paypal.com and shouldn’t be trusted.
https://www.nicva.org/article/tips-and-tools-to-check-links-…
Check the URL’s location (IP address) use
https://www.iplocation.net or https://geoiplookup.net/ip-lookup/
Check the email addresses using View->Message-All Headers or View->Message-Raw Source (Mac mail)
The Captain
be a Fool, not a fool!
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If I got a call like that, I’d check my account on line to see what has been charged lately. If I didn’t see the charge there, I’d get pretty suspicious about the caller.
–Peter
If I got a call like that, I’d check my account on line to see what has been charged lately. If I didn’t see the charge there, I’d get pretty suspicious about the caller.
That’s what I do when I get those calls that say “a $300 purchase has been made on your Amazon account. If you did not make this purchase, call us now”. Of course, it helps that I never answer the phone, so I have a message on my answering machine, so I can’t be panicked/rushed into divulging anything.
I received an e-mail a while back, supposedly from Experian, saying “click this link to enroll in your free account due to the credit agency breech settlement”. No thanks. I called Experian first to see if the e-mail was legit, and I looked up the phone number on Experian’s site, rather than call the number in the e-mail. Yes, the e-mail was legit. Gave me the willies providing all the information for their “monitoring”.
Steve
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