Index – Economy – Tens of thousands of Hungarians were robbed of heavy sums of money

In recent years, parallel to the increase in electronic payment traffic, the value of abuse related to electronic financial transactions has also increased continuously.

According to data from the Magyar Nemzeti Bank, the value of damages caused in non-card-based electronic payment transactions – i.e. transfers and direct debits – was close to HUF 5.8 billion in the fourth quarter of 2023, but damages of more than 2.3 billion were also registered in bank card operations.

CIB Bank explained in its announcement. In addition to all this, there were almost 14,000 attempted abuses worth HUF 4.8 billion.

At the same time, it is good news that the number and value of successful abuse attempts in the fourth quarter already decreased significantly compared to the previous three months. At the same time, it is clear from the central bank statistics that the majority of abuses are based on the acquisition of customer data, that is, fraudsters can access the victims’ money with the help of somehow stolen identifiers.

“With the development of technology and the rapid growth of digital money circulation, criminals also use increasingly sophisticated methods to commit fraud, so it is extremely important that we pay attention to: under no circumstances give others access to our bank IDs,” said Gábor Bártfai, head of information security at CIB Bank.

The golden rules of safe banking

CIB Bank also shared the rules of safe banking in the announcement:

• During their telephone or e-mail inquiries, the financial service providers never ask for the following data in order to use the services, among others: password, login ID, recovery code required for carrying out transactions, so if anyone asks us for these for any reason, do not comply with the request.
• When making electronic purchases and transfers, we always carefully check which interface (e.g. website), to whom and how much amount we transfer or pay.
• We should never allow others access to our electronic devices used for banking operations, nor should we install applications or programs enabling remote access on our computer or mobile phone.
• Suspicious e-mails are deleted without opening the attachments, phone calls indicating phishing are interrupted, and if there is a suspicion of successful abuse, contact our bank immediately and file a police report.

There are several methods that fraudsters like to use. One of them is to call the customer on the name of his bank – it is common that if the name of the financial institution is misplaced online, they pretend to be switched – and they try to obtain identification data citing suspicious financial transactions.

Another common method is to trick the panicked customer into installing a screen-sharing program, also by referring to suspicious account movements, so that they can easily access the account identification data

they warn in the announcement.

Frauds committed using the method of psychic influence also cause significant damage, when fraudsters try to gain access to the victim’s account by pretending to be employees of an aid organization or a foundation supporting noble causes, or friends of a relative who is in trouble.

They emphasized that the customers themselves can do the most for prevention: by keeping a few simple rules in mind, these attempts can be effectively filtered out.