Image credit : The Business Journals
These days people are getting scammed left and right by convincing scammers. Recently, a new Twitter scam has been garnering attention from the public which is targeting banking customers by misusing the quote-tweet feature.
What makes this scam stand apart from the rest is that the scammer preys on customers who tweet at their respective banks to register a complaint or raise an issue. However, instead of getting a response from their bank, they receive replies from scammers that induce them to call a fake helpline number.
Once a bank customer falls into the trap, the scammers can easily persuade their victims to provide sensitive banking details and other information.
It is vital for users on Twitter to remain cautious while tagging their Twitter bank accounts in their tweets, and especially watch out for replies from non-verified Twitter accounts. These accounts might be mimicking the bank’s staff and could be fraud.
Recently, BleepingComputer’s Ax Sharma tagged India’s Axis Bank in a tweet and promptly received a reply as a quote-tweet from another account. This account, however, lacked a verification badge and zero followers, which should raise some red flags. But sometimes companies use a separate Twitter account to handle customer complaints.
What makes this setup even more interesting is that a link to a phishing page would have been blocked and it would raise suspicion in the minds of many users before opening the link. So instead, the scammers used a phone number to avoid such a situation.
Though the account is not on the scene anymore, the scammers behind this campaign could easily create new accounts and change a few digits to raise a new hell altogether.
In order to counter such scams, you need to determine whether a Twitter account is fake or not. First, you should check whether the account is verified or not. Then proceed with checking the profile as real users have unique bios, original tweets, and authentic profile pictures.
