Who provided personal information to the scammers?

A colleague of mine in Hai Duong just fell into a phone scam with the most old-fashioned scenario: being scammed by someone impersonating a police officer, instructed to install the VNeID application, then took control of the phone, and stole money from internet banking.

Many of my other colleagues, friends, and neighbors were more vigilant and were not fooled, but they all said that recently they also received similar calls from people claiming to be police officers from the ward or commune where they currently reside or used to reside.

What makes phone fraud crimes still rampant despite the telecommunications industry's efforts to block junk SIM cards and junk calls? What makes many people, even those with good knowledge, sometimes fall into the trap?

Through information from people who have recently received scam calls, it can be seen that scammers have researched their “prey” quite thoroughly. Not only do they have phone numbers, they also know the victim’s name, occupation, place of residence… Even in the case of my colleague, they even knew what brand of car he had just bought.

We review ourselves to see where we have disclosed personal information? Phone numbers are not a secret, for work reasons many people have to make their phone numbers public for easy contact. When going shopping, booking airline tickets, declaring information at their children's schools..., we all leave our contact phone numbers. Information about name and occupation is not difficult to know, because if you use your phone number to register for a Zalo or Facebook account, from the information you post on these social network accounts, scammers will research and filter to "identify" who you are and what you do.

However, to know clearly where you used to reside/register for permanent residence, I believe that criminals will hardly know through the information users post on social networks (if any, they will have to do a lot of research). The problem is that if they are IT experts, then infiltrating the citizen data system of the police, customer information of telecommunications or banking enterprises and stealing the above personal information becomes a simple matter.

Knowing personal information is how criminals create trust and easily manipulate the psychology of victims when making scam calls. They also seize the opportunity to choose the content of the call. For example, choosing issues related to VNeID personal identification accounts in the context of the Law on Identification about to take effect, many state administrative agencies require administrative procedures to be carried out through this application. The tricks they set up are easy to deceive because many people are not familiar with information technology while in reality our applications and software are not complete, sometimes encountering problems, incidents, and technical errors.

From July 1, according to the State Bank's regulations, users who want to transfer more than 10 million VND/time and more than 20 million VND/day via online bank accounts must authenticate with their faces and fingerprints. This regulation aims to increase the security of bank accounts, limiting the use of fraudsters to appropriate assets through fraudulent calls as above. If the authorities do not do a good job of protecting user data, so that personal information, especially biometric data, is stolen, the risk of losing money in the account still exists.

Along with the development of technology, high-tech crimes are also emerging with increasingly sophisticated tricks. To avoid falling into the fraud trap, in addition to the vigilance of each individual, agencies, organizations, and businesses holding personal information data also need to be one step ahead in protecting data and strictly handle the disclosure of personal information to organizations and criminals.