Now fraudsters are increasingly faking Internet banking websites of large banks and stealing money from the accounts of Ukrainians.

What the fraud scheme looks like:

Fraudsters call Ukrainians from an official bank phone number (for example, FUIB clients can be called from +38 044 290 7 290), and under the guise of employees of the financial institution, they inform that a client has been debited funds or that money is being stolen right now. During the conversation, they send an SMS text (you can often see "INTERNET" in the SMS header), then they are asked to immediately follow the link in the message (it is highlighted in a different color). In this case, they urge the "victim" so that they do not pay attention to the content of the message.

By clicking on the link, the person sees a webpage similar to the webpage of their bank's internet banking, but in fact it is a fake page, created by fraudsters specifically to steal money.

The fraudster informs that for the sake of security, Internet banking has been blocked and for its unblocking it is necessary to immediately recover the password and to tell the secret code from the SMS.

By clicking on the button “Reset password”, the client enters his card number, expiration date, CVV code into the corresponding fields. In this way, fraudsters receive all confidential information of the client.

They just need to quickly go to any payment service for transferring money, enter the stolen data and transfer all money from the "victim's" card to their account. And the secret code from the SMS, which the caller asked to provide, was in fact the code to confirm the money transferring transaction in the payment system service.

“It should be noted that in most cases, fraudsters gain access to the Internet banking of Ukrainians precisely because of their ignorance. The bank never calls customers from the hotline phone numbers as they only exist for incoming calls. This is often used by fraudsters to retrieve sensitive information over the phone. You also need to be especially careful with the messages containing links. It is better to check your account balance in the mobile application of your internet banking", warns security service of FUIB.

Lately, Ukrainians have been receiving SMS texts from fraudsters using free messaging services. For example, if you send a free SMS via Vodafone website, you may notice that at the end of each message, the company indicates that it is not responsible for the content of the messages. But the majority simply does not pay attention to it and confidently provides their data to fraudsters.