– Criminals exploit victims’ naivety to steal the login details to their social media accounts, log into them, and then ask a potential victim among their friends for a quick loan to make purchases – says senior superintendent Kamil Rynkiewicz from the Press Team of the Provincial Police Headquarters in Wrocław.
Spokesperson:
Don’t be fooled! We warn against one form of online fraud. First, offenders steal the access details to their victim’s social media account. They obtain them deceptively—for example, people interested in watching a particular video are asked to verify their age.
During this verification, victims are asked for data “that will confirm their age.” By providing it, they enable the offenders to take over their account.
Impersonating the person whose identity they have just stolen from a social media account, the scammers exploit trust and ask that person’s friends to provide a “BLIK” code. They add that they are standing at the checkout and want to pay for their purchases, but their payment card happened to expire that day.
Let’s stay vigilant and not be misled by appearances. We should also carefully read the messages arriving on our phones during every transaction. This kind of contact may turn out to be an ordinary scam. We may lose our savings, because instead of standing at the checkout, the criminals are standing at an ATM and withdrawing our hard-earned money.
This type of situation happened to our Reader, who asked us to write a “post warning about extorting money through a BLIK transfer.” The woman said:
Yesterday at around 5 p.m., someone hacked into my account and sent messages of this kind to people who were active. Before I managed to change the password, they had sent messages to 30 people. One person was fooled.
Senior superintendent K. Rynkiewicz:
We remind all users of computers, mobile phones and other devices with internet access of several important points:
- protect your passwords and remember that the passwords you enter must not be possible for unauthorised people to decrypt
- for security, change them every few months
- remember to log out of applications every time you finish using them
- do not open emails from unknown senders, especially their attachments
- remember not to enter your login or password when you have any doubts
- any suspicious situations in which we are asked for access details to our social media profile should raise our vigilance.