Sophis­ti­cated phishing attempts by phone

A cur­rent wave of attacks starts with a What­sApp call and might just result in the abuse of your credit card data. Pro­tect yourself!

With this cur­rent phishing wave, someone pre­tending to work for a telecom provider will make con­tact about an alleged block on their victim’s tele­phone number via What­sApp first. Later on in the con­ver­sa­tion, they will fraud­u­lently obtain access to this mobile phone’s pay­ment func­tion allowing the attacker to make pur­chases at their victim’s expense. They will also try to per­suade their victim to enter his or her credit card details on a fake website.

During this attempted fraud, con­sumers are asked to pass on a one-off code they received to their attacker. This is meant to bypass the two-factor authen­ti­ca­tion process of their telecom or credit card provider.

Never pass on con­fi­den­tial infor­ma­tion such as account num­bers, pass­words, PIN codes or one-off codes to anyone to avoid falling victim to attackers like this! Addi­tional infor­ma­tion can also be found in our article on “Phishing”.