Recently, the South Tyrolean Consumer Advice Center has also received an increasing number of complaints about telephone and online scammers. Customers are receiving messages that appear to come from their bank or a credit card provider. In addition, there are so-called spoofing techniques that enable fraudsters to disguise their own telephone number with the number of a seemingly legitimate organization or company. They are asked with great urgency to disclose personal account and card details or to make transfers or click on links ("We have detected irregularities on your account").
The local banks, Sparkasse, Volksbank and Raiffeisenkassen, point out that they never request sensitive data from their customers by telephone, text message or email.
Customers should therefore not pass on any secret information such as PINs, passwords, credit card numbers or access data for online banking by e-mail, text message or telephone. Under no circumstances should they issue authorizations using a reader or app for orders that they have not entered themselves.
In addition, they should never click on links contained in the e-mail or text message.
If customers have the impression that they have received a call from a bank or credit card company asking them to enter their access data, they should hang up to be on the safe side and contact their bank themselves. A firm request to speak in German also often helps to drive fraudsters into a corner. Bank employees also never ask for so-called OTP codes (One-Time Passwords, i.e. a one-time password that is generated and sent to the customer and can be used for a single transaction).
Fraudsters are becoming increasingly sophisticated, which is why customer vigilance is a top priority: "The reports we have received in recent weeks have shown that no age group or educational level is immune to fraud," emphasizes Gunde Bauhofer, Managing Director of the South Tyrolean Consumer Advice Centre. "Instant payments via online banking in particular are the focus of fraudsters - even an immediate call to the bank no longer helps, as there is no time to cancel the transfer, and once the transfer has been made, the money is lost," says Gunde Bauhofer, who calls on account holders to remain vigilant and suspicious.