About 12 customers of National Commercial Bank Jamaica (NCB) have lost approximately $18 million in a smishing and vishing fraud attack over the last 10 days.
Dane Nicholson, NCB’s manager of special investigations in its Fraud Prevention Unit, explains how fraudsters target customers.
He says the internal systems of the country’s largest commercial bank are safe.
What’s the latest on the smishing and vishing situation?
Over the last 10 days or so, we have seen a significant increase in the number of customers falling victim to smishing and vishing attacks. So far, customers have suffered a little over $17 million in losses. A smishing attack is when a fraudster would send customers SMS messages purporting to be coming from an official source in this case from NCB asking the customer to click on a link either because their account is restricted due to suspicious activities, password is about to expire, or something along that line.
There is always some sense of urgency why the customer needs to click on these links to regain access to their accounts.
When the customers click on these links, it takes them to a landing page which is similar to that of ours at NCB. It will ask the customer for their user name, password. Sometimes once the customer clicks ‘next’ or ‘continue’, they receive an error message. There are other instances where these smishing messages will take them to another page where it asks them to put their credit card…
