Telephone scams: how they work and how to avoid falling for them

An bank transfer of 5,000 euros that you did not authorise has been made from your bank account. You have been informed of this by an operator from Poste Italiane. Be careful, however: it is highly likely that this person is, in fact, trying to scam you.

On the morning of 23 September, a lawyer from Frosinone was at the courthouse when she received a call from a fake post office employee, who warned her about an unauthorised bank transfer of 4,999 euros being made from her account. The woman immediately realised it was a scam and played along, so as to buy time and record the call. The Carabinieri were thus able to track down the criminal.

It is called phishing and is a type of scam that lures victims by contacting them under a false identity: the fraudsters pose as financial institutions or public authorities in order to extract personal data and/or usernames and passwords to gain access to bank accounts or other services.

Generally speaking – as the Postal Police explain – the scam begins with an email in which what appears to be the bank or the company managing the victim’s bank accounts alerts them to a system problem. The victim is then asked to access their bank’s ‘home page’ via a specific link. This link leads to a page created by the fraudsters – identical to the bank’s own – where the victim is asked to enter their ‘user ID’ and ‘password’. The criminals thus gain access to the victim’s account.

The scam can also take place via a phone call. Two years ago, the Postal Police had already raised the alarm about incidents of spoofing: fraudsters are able to replicate the telephone numbers of government offices using VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol), which transmits calls over the internet and allows them to hide behind genuine telephone numbers.