Smishing: Swiss bank cus­tomers also targeted

Stay alert – even where text mes­sages are con­cerned! That’s because the names of renowned Swiss com­pa­nies are a favourite for fraud­sters to use in mali­cious schemes.

Remain scep­tical when you receive SMS, MMS, What­sApp or Mes­senger mes­sages asking you to click a link, in par­tic­ular if these are sup­posed to come from a renowned parcel ser­vice or finan­cial ser­vice provider.

As can be seen from a report this week by the Zürcher Kan­ton­spolizei, Smishing remains as pop­ular a means as ever for crim­i­nals to cheat Swiss cit­i­zens out of their money.

Never click on any links included in text mes­sages, but man­u­ally enter the web­site address of your finan­cial insti­tu­tion which you are familiar with into your browser. Then check there is a secure con­nec­tion (https://, lock symbol, target address). In case of uncer­tainty or ambi­guity, please con­tact your finan­cial insti­tu­tion to con­firm they actu­ally sent that text.

Addi­tional infor­ma­tion can also be found in our article on “Phishing“.