A Phishing Story

At a bit after 9:00 am this morning I received a call from someone representing himself as an employee of our bank. His voice was accented but his English was clear. He said that there were two questionable items shown on our Access card and proceeded to read off the sixteen numbers on the card at top speed. I bit. Luckily, I do not keep the numbers of this bank’s access card in my head; I do recall most if not all of the numbers of the card I use to make online payments but this card is one that my husband mostly uses.

And so I asked the man to wait while I got my wallet and found the card. When I got back on the line, the voice requested that I give him the card numbers. At this point, I became cautious. He had, after all, given them to me. And so, I asked him to repeat the numbers while I tracked them on the card. No, he responded. I should give them to him. I was pretty sure that I was smelling a rat by this time and so I told him that since he had given them to me once, it should not be a problem to do it again. The bank rules prevented it, he said. Not credible. I hung up and, to be sure, I decided to call the bank and check.

 I looked up what purported to be a number for our local bank and called it. What I got was the main phone complex for the whole bank, with mindboggling option choices. I chose credit cards and had to sit on hold for almost half an hour. By this time I was annoyed enough to put the call on speakerphone and do my jobs with one hand while I waited. When I got a rep, I told my story and was assured that the call I was reporting was a scam and that I had done the right thing to report it.

Two takeaways from this. One is that this scam is pretty catchy; the bank rep was glad to be told the details. The second is that the bank’s phone policy is extremely annoying, even though the music piped during the hold is broken by recorded assurances about call importance and requests to stay on the line. It should be possible to call the local branch without being redirected to the main number and put on hold. If the redirection is, in fact, necessary, the bank should have enough people on the main complex to prevent long waits. Not to mention using better music.