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SMS About Bank Fraud as a Pretext for Voice Phishing
- themodelplumber 5y ago> Thankfully, Stevens said his daughter had honored the gold rule regarding incoming phone calls about fraud: When In Doubt, Hang up, Look up, and Call Back. Such a great rule. Only it doesn't work with a lot of organizations. One of these huge organizations sent me a message that was worrying. I called; they put me on hold for more than 45 minutes before I had to hang up and get other things done. I decided to try their online messaging tools, which look like a webmail interface. Even then, I couldn't get a direct response, and I decided that rather than wait any longer I'd ignore the whole issue and see if anything bad happened. Nothing bad happened in that case. Another organization got back to me with a link to a policy which said they might get in touch for any number of reasons. But they wouldn't confirm or deny that the communication I linked was from them. Organizations like this will encourage you to use their app for the best messaging experience, but they won't tell you "no" if you ask whether some odd comms from them will still happen via SMS. Customer service wasn't great in either one of these organizations (wish I had a choice). So I'd guess that phishing operatives who really want to exploit other people with these pretexts would put in some basic work to find an organization that has terrible customer service, and imitate them. If the customer service is bad enough, no customer will really be able to check on what you're doing, or alert the organization itself to these issues. So the organization will turn into a de facto shielding and authentication layer for phishing activity. Then, even some number of the group of people who tried to check on what you're doing will still click through in the end--because the rule above didn't work, and they are worried.