Resurgence of the phishing scams targeting customers of DBS Bank via SMS, said Police

There was resurgence of the phishing SMSes that was purportedly sent by the POSB or DBS, as per a joint statement by the DBS Bank and Singapore Police Force on January 22, 2019. Since September 2018, the police received over 90 reports from the victims who have been deceived in providing their Net banking details on fake websites. This happens, after the victims clicked on website addresses in these phishing SMSes.

Later on, it was found by the victims that new payees have been added in their bank accounts and also unauthorised transactions have been made.

The bank customers who click links in SMS were redirected towards a non-DBS website, like posb-dbs-sg.org, posb-dbs.com, posb-dbs-protect.com, posb-dbs-firewall.com and dbs-posb.com.

The police reiterated, as per statement, that two other phishing scams variants were observed after November 14, 2018.

In first variant, fake job ads on famous classified websites, like Gumtree, were posted by the scammers to recruit the surveyors, staff members of the food and beverage or the order assistants. The unsuspecting job applicants will receive an e-mail, which states that they have got the job. Then, the scammers tell the victims (i.e. job applicants) to provide their personal information, which includes the bank account details. Soon after as part of the jobs, these victims would be asked to withdraw the money that has been supposedly transferred by the company, for whom they are working for, in their bank accounts. The victims then have to deposit the withdrawn money in Bitcoin ATMs.

However, in reality, the withdrawn money was not transferred by the company, but from bank accounts of victims who clicked on URLs in phishing SMSes.

In second variant of the phishing scams, scammers befriended the users of online gaming and social platforms before telling them to buy bitcoins. The scammers also agree to help in purchasing the bitcoins, and they ask for bank account details of those users in order to transfer money to them. Moreover, the users were also informed that they can keep some of the transferred money as commission. However, the users have to withdraw the remaining money, and then deposit that in Bitcoin ATMs for completing the purchase.

Just like the first variant, money received by the users was actually transferred from bank accounts of various phishing scam victims.

» SPAMfighter News - 2/12/2019