Caution: Scammers in Hungary bombard with new tricks, banks warn

OTP Bank warned its customers of a sharp increase in the number of scammers who use the name of the institution to steal personal information – and money.

OTP Bank has come forward to alert customers of potential fraudulent calls, and not for the first time, Pénzcentrum reports. Criminals, they say, call the bank’s clients and pretend to be administrators of the institution. Then, they ask for personal and bank identification data and then lift the money from the accounts of the unsuspecting victim. To sell their act, they will even send pictures of fake IDs to the customer to prove that they are really from the financial institution.

In the last 30 years, the typical criminal activity has changed from street and organised crime or intellectual crime to fraud committed in the online space, Infostart summarises. According to the site, last year, cybercriminals committed 160,000 cases of credit card fraud, causing HUF several billion in damages. László Sonjic, senior consultant of OTP Bank’s IT and Bank Security Directorate, highlighted that today, the number of “classic” attacks against banks has reduced significantly: criminals primarily target customers instead.

The most common tactics to look out for

Con artists often tell customers that the safety of their accounts is at risk, or that a suspicious transfer has been initiated by a third party. Then, they will ask the customer to download an “antivirus” program or an app to their device to prevent fraudulent transfers from occurring. These programs, in turn, will allow criminals to access the data on electronic devices, such as the login information to the online banking system. This way, scammers can easily transfer money from the customers’ accounts to their own.

In other cases, they will ask victims to transfer their money to so-called “security accounts” while they try to prevent the supposed fraudulent transfer from occurring. In both cases, it is the customer themself who hands their account to the criminals.