‘Spoofing’ Bank Text Scam Warning

Over the last six days 14 individual reports of a bank text scam have been reported to the States of Jersey Police, totalling losses of £138,000 to islanders. In 2023 SoJP recorded a total loss £624,000 to these type of bank scams. 

Theses texts and calls are called ‘spoofing’, which refers to a common term for people pretending to be from legitimate companies by changing their number to show that legitimate company’s number rather than their personal number. 

Victims of these scams will either receive a fake text from an entity, in most cases the name of a high-street bank, claiming that a payment of a certain amount, was attempted on their account. In these particular cases the scammers have used CryptoCom as the recipient company. The payment normally is something that the person wouldn’t recognise so scammers would tend to say crypto as people are unfamiliar with this. The rest of the message reads, reply Y is this was you, if not, reply N and you will receive a call shortly. 

If the victim responds this will prompt the scammer to call them. 

In these calls the scammers are able to tell the victim personal information about themselves, such as personal data like their address or date of birth and even bank information like recent payments or even the bank card numbers themselves. The scammer will explain that the account has been compromised and that the victim will have to move the money to other accounts. To do this, the scammer will ask for the victims banking information or things like the security questions to gain access to the account to allow for the money to move into a safe account. 

The scammer will also sometimes say that the account is blocked, and in order to unfreeze the account the victim has to provide their personal details. Or that the only person that can do this is the scammer themselves pretending to be from the bank. The scammer will explain they need access to the account as it is frozen and they need to move the money to a safe account or another account in the victims bank. 

The victim will usually believe the scammer and will inadvertently give access to their account. The victim will not realise until later that they have been scammed with their account being cleared of all its funds. 

As the scammers are so convincing, victims are even by passing their one-time secure key and giving that to the scammers.