Caught in the act…

Criminals are experts at impersonating legitimate companies in an effort to win your trust and ultimately gain additional information from you or get remote access to your devices, such as your PC, laptop, tablet or mobile phone.

The tactics that they deploy vary from scam to scam, but their ultimate goal remains the same, they want to take your money from you. This might be by card transactions, bank transfers or in some cases, they may even convince their victims to withdraw cash and send it to them in the post!

If you are unfortunate to receive a call from one of these criminals, remember, you are in control and can end the call at any time – only a criminal would try to rush or pressure you.

A Danske Bank colleague was the recipient of a call from one of these criminals and, spotting early in the call that it was a scam took the opportunity to record the conversation. The call lasted 15 minutes before the criminal lost patience with our colleague; however, we have seen cases where these kind of scenarios have calls lasting many hours and often resulted in a financial loss.

During this call, the criminal wanted access to our colleague’s mobile phone and engineered them to download an app known as ‘QuickSupport’ to facilitate this. They even knew to ask our colleague to switch off his Wi-Fi as their broadband provider was blocking the app’s access.

After downloading the app the criminal moves quickly to request what they describe as a ’10 digit refund code’. This is displayed on our colleague’s phone screen however; this unique code is actually needed by the criminal to create the connection from his device to our colleague’s.

At this point, the criminal still does not have control of the device, they need our colleague to follow some more instructions, an important one is clicking on the ‘allow’ button that is shown on the screen (see the image below). Our colleague decides to challenge the criminal on his actions, however knowing that he is so close to getting access to the device the criminal gets very animated in his responses.