More than €50,000 has been taken from three Tipperary bank accounts, as a result of recent fraud scams.
The scams all happened over the past fortnight and all related to people clicking on a link in a text message, which then gave fraudsters access to take over their account.
On August 3rd, a person in Nenagh was robbed of €18,000, while an incident in Thurles two days later saw someone lose €13,000 and another incident in Clonmel resulted in the loss of €20,000.
The texts purport to be from a bank, citing unusual activity or attempted log ins.
Sergeant Declan O’Carroll from Nenagh Garda Station told Tipp Today how the scams operate.
“A large number of fraud incidents have been reported to Gardaí in the past two weeks.
“The types of fraud recently have been what’s known as account take over frauds.
“Basically, the injured party is invited to click a link, which brings them to a cloned website.
“The fraudsters will attempt to find out the injured party’s account details in a number of different ways, including looking for three digits of your PIN and when you enter, you get an error message and they look for the other three digits and then have your PIN number and are able to access your account.”
Gardaí have the following advice for people;
– Never click on a link of an unsolicited text.
– Never give away personal data like PIN number, card numbers, passwords or one time codes.
– Banks would never request a customer return a card to the bank in such circumstances.
– Be very wary of cold calls, just because the number looks Irish does not mean it is, fraudsters use VOIP numbers.
– If you are concerned hang up and ring your bank or service provider from a number advertised in the phone book or on your bill.
– If you are expecting a deliver and receive such a text be very careful and again only ring official numbers.
