Vishing

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Vishing is a form of online fraud . The name stands for "voice phishing " and is (from the English term for fishing out fishing ) and the method of deployed VoIP - telephony derived.

Automated telephone calls attempt to mislead the recipient and induce them to hand over access data, passwords , credit card details , etc. Recently, it has evidently also been about personal data such as gender, first name, age and the like in order to combine computer identifications with personal data to create profiles, if this is not possible automatically. The fraudsters take advantage of the low costs of Internet telephony and automatically call countless telephone numbers. In order to effectively prevent vishing, it is advisable to immediately end calls that ask for personal information. Instead, a call should be made to the company concerned to find out whether there is actually a request.

Another variant of vishing is to send a telephone number to many e-mail recipients via spam mail, whereby these messages are provided with the request to contact the specified telephone number. There the callers are asked to give their personal data by a tape announcement. This procedure turns out to be particularly insidious because it takes advantage of the advice of many financial institutions not to respond to e-mails but to seek contact by telephone.

In 2006, there were vishing attacks against customers of banks and savings banks in Germany. Con artists, so-called visher, looked for bank details and telephone numbers on the Internet. Then they called these bank customers by phone. The fraudsters pretended to be employees of the respective bank and asked the bank customer for their online bank access data ( PIN , TAN and account number ) and carried out fraudulent transfers with them.

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