Bank Telephone Scams Are Everywhere
This is to alert you about the pervasive telephone scams affecting customers of most U.S. banks.
Scammers are using fake caller ID information to trick people into thinking that their bank is calling them. They are trying to gain access to your personal data and finances through Online Banking.
What you need to know:
Callers/scammers claim to be from your bank with some type of alert regarding suspicious account activity that they need to confirm with you. Often they even manufacture a fraudulent “pending charge” to make it seem legitimate.
During the call, the scammer will eventually ask you to provide a numeric security code that was sent to your phone, and/or ask you to answer your online banking security questions.
While most banks do make outbound service calls to their customers, when they call, they will never ask you to provide or verify:
• Your full social security number
• A numeric security code for a one-time password
• Your username
• Your password
• Your full account number
• Answers to security questions over the phone
If you give scammers critical information such as that listed above, they will use this information to reset your account credentials and take over your account. All U.S. banks send emails to customers regarding any changes to their account, such as username and password changes. If you receive an email from your bank regarding these types of changes that you did not initiate, please call your bank immediately.
What you should do
If you receive a phone call requesting any of the information above, hang up and call your bank immediately.
In this day an age, I am so surprised that people still fall for this stuff. When someone calls and asks for their user name, password and SS number, that should e a red flag. If it was really the bank, they would not need you to supply that info to them. They would just ask you to verify the charges to the account. That’s it.
Just as you say, any suspicions you have about the call, just hang up and call your bank. Thank you for reminding everyone to be careful. When we are in a hurry or busy we tend to be careless sometimes.
I’m going to bring this up at my next monthly meeting we have at my 55 community. j