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What methods are used by fraudsters to steal money from cards?

Mar 28, 2021

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How to avoid becoming a victim?


When funds are stolen from bank cards and accounts, it is difficult to return money: in the first half of 2020, only 12% of what was stolen was returned. What types of fraud are common and how to avoid theft, let’s have a brief overview?

In the first half of 2020, fraudsters stole 50K+ USD from bank customers from their cards and accounts, having made more than 20 thousand unauthorized transactions. Of this amount, banks were able to return to the victims only 12.1% and the total amount of stolen funds is 39% higher than the figures for the same period last year.

Ways to steal money from credit cards




The most common form of fraud is social engineering - methods of deceiving and misleading customers in order to steal money. According to the Central Bank, in the first half of 2020, it accounted for 83.8% of the total number of attacks. Traditionally, fraudsters call bank clients under the guise of "bank security" or "financial monitoring services" and report that a suspicious transaction has been made with the card. Under the pretext of saving money, they force the client to take a series of actions in order to steal money from his account. Attackers obtain contact and personal information about clients by buying "merged" databases on the dark net (the shadow segment of the Internet) or finding them there in the public domain. Also, for persuasiveness, they can call from spoofed numbers of banks and other structures. Further, the fraud scheme develops according to several scenarios.

  • Fraudsters lure out the payment information of the card (16-digit number, owner's name, expiration date and three-digit code on the back, as well as the code from the SMS from the bank) or they deceive the data for entering the personal account.

  • Sometimes fraudsters in the course of a call ask to install a special application on the phone, supposedly for better protection - they turn out to be a remote access and control program with which you can enter the victim's online bank account and transfer money from there to your account.

  • Remote access programs help not only to steal all available money, but also to issue a pre-approved loan in the mobile application, if such a product is offered to the client, and then withdraw the borrowed funds.

  • Attackers can reissue SIM cards by taking advantage of a mistake or dishonesty of employees of communication salons: for this, it is enough to know the full name and the potential victim's phone number. “An attacker comes to a cellular phone shop and asks to reissue a SIM card, as a document presents a forged copy of a passport or a power of attorney. Having received what he wants, he installs the card in the phone and tries to bind this number to mobile banking. Typically, this requires entering one-time codes several times.


How to avoid becoming a victim of scammers in online purchases


However, it is difficult to return the money that was stolen using social engineering, since the victim voluntarily confirmed the transactions on his account but in modern internet era there lies a dark web technology that protect us from fraudsters and make our life better. Those are CVV dumps, a 3 digit code located at the back of your credit card. These CVV dumps refer to the credit card record along with costumers name, address and other information present on the credit card.

When making an online purchase it’s best to avoid shady websites and individuals. Stick to reputable websites and companies that have security encryption for safety.

For safety on the Internet, it is recommended to use antivirus programs, do not follow links in messages containing generous offers or sent by strangers, when entering the Internet bank, pay attention to the presence in the address bar https: // and a closed padlock icon (this means a secure connection) ... When paying for goods on the Internet, you need to pay attention to the page of the payment system, to which the seller's website should redirect to enter payment data.

Tags: English