Familiar scam tricks but people still get scammed out of all their money

At the workshop “Improving security and safety of cashless transactions”, held on June 14 in Ho Chi Minh City, Mr. Ngo Tuan Anh, General Director of SCS Cyber ​​Security Company, shared about two cases of being scammed out of 3 billion VND and 1 billion VND with very familiar scam tricks.

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Fraudulent installation of fake public services is a very familiar scam, but people are still continuously being tricked out of all their assets. Photo: NCS

The case of being scammed out of 3 billion VND was that the husband hid the money from his wife to invest, the scammer lured him to invest in a project related to Long Thanh airport. In the beginning, when he deposited a small amount of money to invest, the husband saw that it was profitable very quickly and could withdraw the money, so he was very excited. Immediately after that, the scammer offered investment packages with higher profit rates, the husband withdrew all the money in his account and borrowed more from friends to continue investing and was scammed out of all his money, falling into debt.

The second case is a woman who was scammed out of more than 1 billion VND. The scammer called and tricked her into downloading and registering public service software on her phone. In fact, it was spyware. When installed, it controlled the victim's phone. Then, the scammer asked her to transfer a registration fee of 12,000 VND. When the victim opened the banking application to transfer money, the spyware recorded it. In this way, the scammer stole more than 1 billion VND from the victim's account.

According to Mr. Ngo Tuan Anh, the above fraud cases still occur because there are still rented bank accounts and impersonations of other people. There are cases where scammers go to remote areas, mountainous areas, ask vegetable sellers at the market, borrow citizen identification cards to register accounts and the bad guys use that account. Or there are still junk SIM cards, in other countries, registering to buy a phone SIM card requires many complicated steps, but in Vietnam, buying a SIM card that can make and receive calls is too easy.

Both of the above scams are familiar tricks, continuously warned by authorities in the media for a long time, but many people are still deceived.

Speaking with VietNamNet reporter, Mr. Vu Ngoc Son, Technology Director, Vietnam National Cyber ​​Security Technology Company (NCS), said there are a number of reasons why people continue to be scammed, even though the tricks of scammers are not new.

First of all, the psychology of users is still affected when listening to the "stories" of scammers. It can be the psychology of greed when hearing about great promotions, high-profit investments, or it can also be the psychology of anxiety when encountering problems or relatives and friends in emergency situations. This psychological factor always exists somewhere in each person no matter how many times they are warned.

Next, due to the sophistication of fraud methods, when subjects constantly change and transform the forms of fraud, based on real events. Therefore, their content often matches 70-80% compared to what the victim has known. In addition, the support of new technologies such as deepfake makes fraudulent content even more difficult to recognize.

Finally, there are loopholes related to management such as spam phone numbers, spam account numbers in circulation, personal information being leaked, accounts being hacked, being faked, leading to an environment and tools for scammers still being abundant.

How to prevent fraud

According to Mr. Vu Ngoc Son, to prevent fraud, users should not rush to believe in the content, images or clips received; they need to verify through independent channels, such as calling a known mobile or landline number, or asking another person.

Do not transfer money to personal accounts that have never been used and regularly update information to improve your ability to recognize and detect signs of fraud.

Meanwhile, Mr. Ngo Tuan Anh said that it is necessary to strengthen the management of SIM cards, in addition to protecting users' personal information, so that bad guys do not have information to conduct fraud. According to Mr. Ngo Tuan Anh, if Decree 13 on personal data protection is applied, junk SIM cards are strictly managed and Decision 2345 of the State Bank is applied in the near future on biometric authentication when transferring money, many problems related to fraud will be reduced.

Journalist Tran Xuan Toan, Deputy Editor-in-Chief of Tuoi Tre Newspaper, also said that the media has continuously issued warnings about many similar scams but people are still being scammed, so it is necessary to further promote propaganda work. The responsibility of media agencies is to turn propaganda content warning and guiding people to prevent scams into press products with content that is easy to understand, easy to visualize and easy to convey.

It needs to be spread across all media and social networking platforms so that people from rural to urban areas can access information and even information about the latest policies.