Commonwealth Bank (CBA) has issued an urgent warning following a mass text messaging scam pretending to be a “security alert,” urging individuals to secure their account.
This latest alert follows recently released statistics that reveal Aussie have lost over $455 million to scam over 2023, most targeting people aged over 65.
The most recent text scam, pretending to be CBA officials, requests people to click a suspicious link to “secure” their account, claiming “a new CommBank App” had been registered to their account.
A spokesman for CBA said the link was not legitimate.
“The bank would never ask customers to log on or provide sensitive info via a link in an email or text. Customers should immediately delete any of those messages received.”
The spokesman urged customers to protect themselves by turning on notifications in their banking app, or enabling security features.
ScamWatch, run by the ACCC (Australian Competition and Consumer Commission), statistics reveals Aussies lost $455,436,239 to scams over 2023.
Over $275m was lost to investment scams, which was the most out of any category.
99,736 reports were made to banks for phishing scams, which was followed by 36,645 reports being made for false billing scams, and 19,565 reports for online shopping scams.
There were over 280,000 reports made in total for scams.
Just last week, NAB revealed it was monitoring an emerging type of voice impersonation scams. These use AI to trick individuals into sending money.
They can be created with as little as “three seconds” of social media audio, voicemail, or website video.
Advisory Awareness Manager at NAB, Laura Hartley said, “The loved one might claim they’ve been beaten up or kidnapped and won’t be freed unless the person sends money.”
“While these scams use readily available technology, they do require criminals to find a link between the person receiving the phone call and the person in ‘distress’ so they’re harder to scale than other scams.”
Common red flags to be on the lookout for are unexpected phone calls from a purported “loved one” in “distress,” urgency in asking for payment, and requests for secrecy, not to tell anyone what happened.
