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Woman tells of falling victim to cellphone fraud |
| Criminals persuade shop assistants to do illegal SIM swops to access accounts The police and their crime intelligence arm are investigating a new scam where criminals convince cellphone shop assistants to do illegal sim swops so that they can steal an unsuspecting customer's personal details. This is exactly what happened to Cape Town woman Shaundré Stewart last week. "I was on my way home from work in the taxi when someone called me on my cellphone looking to speak to some funny name. I told him that he had the wrong number, and he hung up." She later went to a mall to do some shopping, and when she had finished, she bought MTN airtime so that she could call her husband to pick her up. "My cellphone kept saying 'no network', so I thought it may be because of the weather. I tried many times to load the airtime but couldn't. I decided to call him from a payphone." Later Stewart and her husband Richard tried to draw money from an ATM and there was only R47 in her account. Two days earlier, she said, she had made payments via internet banking and her balance had been R947. "I found it terribly strange that there was R900 short, but because it was late, I thought I will deal with it in the morning." The following morning she got a call from Absa requesting information. Had she done a sim swop, as an amount of R900 was taken out of her account in two stages the previous day for airtime to two different numbers? "They stole my cellphone number to access my bank account. Now they have my account number," said Stewart, who has had to close her Absa account and cancel her internet banking. Carl Louw, the head of Absa's internet channel, said it appeared that Stewart had been a victim of identity theft. He said that in this case it could have been a phishing attack combined with an illegal sim swop, or a key-logging attack combined with an illegal sim swop. He explained: "A phishing e-mail is an e-mail sent to the client, purporting to be from their bank, requesting they click on a hyperlink to update or confirm their log-in credentials and supply other personal details, including their cellphone number. "A key-logging attack occurs when fraudsters place either a physical device or load software, commonly on public computers like internet cafés or hotel lobbies, which track the keystrokes inputted by users. For this reason, we urge clients never to do internet banking on public terminals. Following one of these tactics, said Louw, the fraudster would have visited a cellular service shop and convinced the staff member to perform a SIM swop. This would have meant the valid cellular subscriber (the defrauded party) lost signal; and the fraudster gained access to all incoming calls and smses. Louw could not say how many similar cases Absa had received, nor could he say whether Stewart would get her money back. MTN spokeswoman Bridget Bhengu said the service provider was not aware of this case. "We are currently investigating and will provide details after the investigation has been finalised." Meanwhile, Tummi Golding, the police's crime intelligence spokeswoman, said she was not familiar with the method by which Stewart was fleeced. "No, this is a new one. We know about every possible scam, but we've never heard of this. We are going to follow this up immediately." she said. By Kashiefa Ajam The Saturday Star 23/05/09e2 Click here to respond to this article - Your responses will get vetted and printed on "Have your Say" Click here if you would like to be alerted to new Crime Awareness articles. |
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