Comment by Abishek_Muthian
14 hours ago
Tangent: I used to receive at least a dozen bank scam calls per day in India, especially during insurance renewal. I wanted the banks to publish official phone numbers and mandate their employees to use only official numbers.
Recently the regulatory bodies did just that and so the banks should only use 1600 numbers to contact their customers. My bank scam calls have dropped to 0.
In France, basically every bank say (show in their app and everything) "if we call you and ask anything like code, confirmation, to do an action, anything, end the call and call us back, don't do anything on a call you didn't initiate".
Same in their app eg you try to do a sepa wire to a new recipient and you get a warning "are you on the phone with someone ? did someone ask you to do that ? please call your bank by pressing this button. By the way we will never call you to ask an auth code or to do a wire"
Here is a fun one, my mobile phone company has an account lock along with a pin and OTP over SMS system. In order for me to activate a new device (like an phone upgrade) with eSIM over the phone, I need to unlock my account with account lock, give them the pin over the phone, and read the SMS OTP to the mobile phone rep online. I get doing the account unlock and verbal pin, but I don't get why they ask for the OTP especially when they train us to never share the OTP over the phone. I even asked the rep about it, but he mentioned that you should never share the OTP if you did not initiate the service request. From a security posture point of view I think that stinks. I am not exactly sure how they expect SMS OTP to work in the case where my phone is not functional.
Oh man that brings back memories!
"Hello, I'm calling from Blockchain, I would like to talk about your investment portfolio"
it weirded me out they would pretend to be from the underlying technology instead of an exchange or something. I kept thinking I should pretend to be the CEO of TCP/IP or something when they called.
Knowing what numbers are real through an official publication is very good, but it only allows you to place trust in calls you make, not calls you receive, because making calls doesn't involve caller ID, receiving calls does, and caller ID is spoofable.
That's the number one rule though. If someone calls you claiming to be your bank, just say "I'll call you back"
Ask them their name/ last initial, employee ID or unique identifier for the conversation, direct phone number, job title and what location they're based at. Scammers will pretty much always refuse/argue/hang up on this (once I had one start insulting my mother in Hindi when I asked him this). Then call your bank's proper number and verify all of these details.
(But in any case your bank will never call outwards to you, unless you've specifically requested that, which you almost never do.)
16 replies →
Or, which has worked great for me; just never answer the phone. If people need something they will email or chat. If not then it is not going to be important.
2 replies →
Nowadays, when banks call you here, they allow you to verify the bank is actually calling you with the mobile app - you can see their name and number they're calling you from in the app. Also, you can often verify you're you with the app too, same as any other app authorization, so you don't have to share any details over the phone. I feel like this is a pretty good improvement.
We have an app called bankid. If my bank calls me they'll ask me to open the app to auth, the app shows that the specific bank initiated auth and also says that they called me.
Same app is used to auth to government pages and all kinds of stuff online, even purchases.
That would take nothing to implement. Services like Truecaller already do live caller ID against databases on iOS / Android. All it would take is a sensible register of verified numbers
Several of the bank scammers had their profile verified as the bank in the Truecaller[1].
[1] https://xcancel.com/Abishek_Muthian/status/18063480222902113...
3 replies →
My bank has a feature whereby it'll tell you promoinently in their app if they are currently calling you.
is it common for banks to call you?
always though the agreement was: we don't call you, you call us. we'll send letters though.
Recently, banks where also asked to put their official websites/netbanking on *.bank.in domains. I have wanted that for SO long.