Scammers impersonate brands people already know and trust, and banks are among the most effective disguises available to them when trying to catch out people and businesses.
“Scammers love to impersonate known brands, known entities,” said Shannon Brown, CommBank’s Fraud and Scams Industry, Intelligence and Disruption Senior Manager. “But they also really like to impersonate banks.”
The clearest example is the callback scam, and it starts with a message that doesn’t ask you to click anything.
“Customers may receive an SMS or an email asking them to call a number to fix a problem,” Brown said. Ringing a number feels like the cautious thing to do, which is part of why it works.
“When the customer calls that number, they actually hear hold music and an automated voice asking them to select an option to talk with a phone specialist,” Brown said. “It sounds really legitimate and really mimics that call centre experience that most of us are familiar with.”
“In a lot of these scam calls, we hear scammers say, hey, I know the first six digits of your card,” Brown said. “People take that as a sign of familiarity. They think, obviously you must work for the bank because you know my card number.”
Those six digits are not personal information. They can often be a bank identification number, which is standard across a card range, so the same six digits sit on many cards. Brown says scammers may already know them from publicly sourced information.
Brown says they will ask for details such as a client number, a password, multi-factor authentication codes, or a full card number, anything that helps them take over an account or gain unauthorised access. They may even ask you to download remote access software to access your computer.
The other version is a direct request for money, and it tends to arrive in the same words.
“Often they’ll use language like, make a payment to a safe account, and that’s a really big red flag,” Brown said.
Stop. If a call or text claiming to be CommBank seems suspicious, take a breath so you can think clearly before you act.
Check. Look for a different way to verify it. If the contact claims to be from CommBank, hang up and reach us through official channels like the CommBank website, CommBank app or the number on the back of your card.
Reject. Cut off the contact, don’t make a payment and don’t hand over your information.
Read the full story at CommBank Newsroom
