It’s perfectly okay to be alarmed at this news. Just don’t lose control.
Fraudsters trying to get into your bank account have stepped up their game a notch.
If you thought you were fine once you did not click on a phishing link and you did not entertain a call from any random person claiming to be calling from your bank, please be informed that you are wrong.
It is now possible for fraudsters to use your bank’s legitimate customer care line to defraud you. How is that even possible? I don’t have any answers at this point. But I’m writing from personal experience.
On 22 December, 2020 at 9:15, an eleven digit number called me. I picked and an automated voice identified itself as Kiki and told me a suspicious debit transaction just took place on my account. If it was me, I should ignore, if not, I should call the same number that just called me within 10 minutes or the transaction would be allowed.
The number seemed genuine to me, but I didn’t rely on my gut feelings. I turned to Google. Yep, the number was genuine. That’s the same number plastered everywhere, Sterling Bank’s website, social media handles etc.
It must be a genuine call then. I became alarmed that I had wasted a few minutes to double-check the number instead of calling immediately to stop the fraudulent transaction. But then, it’s an age when many youngsters are leaving school with no better game plan than hoping to cream off as many people as possible to have a house by the beach and ride a Ferrari. You can’t be too careful.
I quickly called the Sterling Bank customer care line and was connected to an Interactive Voice Response system. I thought that was another indication that the earlier call was genuine. Our average fraudsters aren’t that sophisticated. IVR systems do not come cheap. They cannot make that investment, or so I thought.
Now, if you have ever had to call your bank’s customer care line, or Multichoice Customer care line, you would understand how IVR works. You are presented with a set of menus and you are expected to pick one at each stage so you can be directed to the best resource or the agent that can best resolve your issue.
The first set of menus I was given were innocuous enough. I blazed through them until I got to a point the system asked me to choose an option to validate my identity. The options included either my ATM card PIN, or my Internet code, or USSD PIN. It was at that point I applied the brakes. This same IVR told me a few seconds earlier as part of its preamble that Sterling Bank would not ask me for my ATM PIN etc. Why was it asking me to input it now? I calmly disconnected the call and went to bed.
People of God, 10 minutes passed and no fraudulent transaction happened on my account o!
On a serious note, it’s still a puzzle how that happened. I put the number on Trucaller and it turned out that it had been marked for scamming by some other users. There were a total of 1,951 spam reports as of then.
I have alerted Sterling Bank to this through their social media handles and they are investigating. Hopefully, they can get to the bottom of it soonest. Meanwhile, get wise to this latest trend.
