2024-07-04 19:08:20
Fraudsters are always coming up with new ways to rip people off. We’ll show you how they’re currently being ripped off.
There is a real wave of rip-offs currently hitting consumers. Fraudsters are trying to gain access to sensitive data, credit cards and accounts, primarily through digital channels. You can always read the latest scams they are currently using here.
The Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) is warning of a new form of the grandparent scam. “Artificial intelligence will soon make it possible to perfectly imitate the real voices of grandchildren,” BSI President Claudia Plattner told “Stern”. The person being called will then no longer be able to tell the difference.
Plattner advises consumers to inform their grandparents about these types of deception attempts. “It’s best to practice this situation with grandma and grandpa and agree on a code word that you would say in case of doubt – for example, the name of your first pet,” says the expert.
Last year, the Thuringia Consumer Advice Center warned of this attempted scam. “Pay attention to small irregularities in the voice – such as choppy-sounding fragments of words – in order to unmask a possible scam,” said Ralf Reichertz, head of the consumer law department at the Thuringia Consumer Advice Center at the time.
In the so-called grandparent scam, fraudsters deliberately call older people. They pretend to be their grandchildren and claim to be in an emergency. Sometimes someone calls pretending to be a police officer to increase the credibility of the story and put more pressure on the potential victims.
Amazon has a number of customers in Germany. It is therefore not surprising that users of the platform are repeatedly targeted by fraudsters. An email is currently circulating in which customers are asked to update their payment details. This was reported by the information portal “Mimikama”. The account is allegedly in a “holding loop” – i.e. temporarily blocked – due to “billing problems”.
The email asks you to click on a button to update your payment information and reactivate your account. To underline the supposed urgency of the matter, it says that the data must be updated within 24 hours. This can lead to those affected reacting immediately out of fear of losing their account and thus falling into the scammers’ net.
“Mimikama” points out that there are some elements that reveal the email to be a scam. For example, the Amazon logo is missing and the farewell message only contains the words “Thank you”, which is not what a reputable company would write. Anyone who receives this message should delete it without replying or move it to the spam folder.
An attentive bank employee in Augsburg prevented an elderly lady from being cheated out of a large sum of money last week. As the “Augsburger Allgemeine” newspaper reports, the 70-year-old woman received a so-called shock call in the early afternoon, in which unknown people pretended to be police officers. The caller told the woman that her daughter had been in an accident abroad in which someone had died. The fake police officer demanded cash in order to release the daughter.
The 70-year-old then drove to her bank and withdrew a sum in the low five-figure range. She was supposed to hand this money over to a messenger at the Augsburg District Court, it is said. But then a bank employee intervened, finding the woman’s behavior strange. He stopped her and informed the “real” police. They are now investigating fraud.
The consumer advice center is warning of a new scam in which cyber criminals are trying to lure Commerzbank customers into a trap with phishing emails, asking them to update their customer data.
The subject is: “Update your profile for improved security in online banking”. However, upon closer inspection, there are signs of an attempted fraud. The first sign is the impersonal greeting “Dear Commerzbank customer”. In addition, the dubious sender address also points to phishing.