Telecom Fraud Alerts - July - Sept 2019

Fraudster sentenced after funding luxury holidays through £50k smishing scam

A fraudster from London who went on luxury holidays abroad after harvesting details from thousands of bank customers has been sentenced to two years and nine months in prison.

* Source: https://www.actionfraud.police.uk/

Watch out for phone calls from paradisiacal places: "Numbers seem to be from the Brussels area"

The Operator received more than 30 complaints in recent days from people receiving annoying phone calls from strangers. These are callers from paradisiacal places such as Samoa (country code +685), Papua New Guinea (+675) and Ascension (+247).

* Source: https://www.hln.be/

Robocalls keep pouring in as hijacking threat emerges — how to stop

Despite new initiatives by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and carriers, robocalls aren’t on the wane. Americans are still facing a scourge of 200 million unwanted robocalls a day.

* Source: https://www.forbes.com/

Tier 1 APAC operator sniffs sim-swap racket; lens on insiders

A major SIM-swapping racket allegedly involving insiders and fake Aadhaar cards to hijack customers' premium numbers and commit online banking frauds has come to light at telecom major.

* Source: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey falls prey to sim swap fraud, hackers gain account access for 20 min

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is a prolific tweeter, but just an hour ago, his account was seeing a lot of activity. Most of the tweets were single line tweets with some of the tweets having blatantly racist language. It seemed far from drunk tweeting.

* Source: https://www.firstpost.com/

SIM swap fraud is on the rise in Spain, experts warn

If you suddenly lose your smartphone signal for no good reason, check your bank accounts. When Mario Fernández’s cellphone signal failed, he came out with the familiar “Damn technology!” He switched it off, then back on again, but to no avail. 

* Source: https://elpais.com/

Telco suspected fraud but allowed a customer's phone number to be ported anyway. Then he was hacked

Christopher Collins woke up on a Saturday morning to find a text from a service provider welcoming him to their service. The problem was, he was not a customer of that particular service provider.

* Source: https://www.abc.net.au/

UK remains a prime target for telephone scammers, report shows

The UK remains one of the prime targets for telephone scammers seeking to make money out of tricking people into calling back bogus numbers and incurring high charges, according to an international telecoms carrier.

* Source: https://www.ft.com/

New telecom scam sweeping across Taiwan

Woman cheated out of NT$3,000 by new telecom scam in Taiwan. Reports have surfaced over the past few days of a new scam in which smartphone users receive a notification that their "package" has been sent and that they only need to enter their telephone number and verification code.

* Source: https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/

For all previous fraud alerts click on the following link: https://www.subex.com/fraud-alerts/

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