In recent years, financial fraud has increased, mainly identity theft, in which cybercriminals impersonate people’s information to open accounts, steal money or contract services, which triggers a debt for the victims that does not correspond to them .
The National Commission for the Protection and Defense of Financial Service Users (Condusef), registered 24,215 fraud claims during 2021, 52% more than in 2020.
The Condusef mentions that identity is constituted by personal data such as name, telephone number, address, photographs, fingerprints, license numbers, social security, financial or medical information, identification credentials or other data that allows a person to be identified.
This type of information is what is usually used illegally to make requests for credits or services that can be processed online.
How do you access my information?
Darío Vargas Regalado, a specialist in digital transformation and information security, points out that there are three main ways in which identity thieves can access a person’s information.
The first is phishing, which consists of impersonating the identity of the bank or institution, to notify the user via email that unusual movements have been detected in their account or some type of promotion. It is usually accompanied by a link that leads to false pages to request the information of a person’s accounts.
Another method used by cybercriminals is vishing, in which information is obtained from the victim by means of a telephone call, also supplanting the information of a bank or institution to request the data of people’s accounts.
Given this, Darío Vargas emphasizes that banks do not ask for passwords, confirmation or verification codes, or telephone numbers linked to accounts.
“When they start to request or ask for information that institutions should normally have, it is a fraud alert, at which point we must hang up the call and block the number,” Darío commented.
Another method often used by criminals to access information is smishing, which, through text messages, sends false alerts or links that lead to fake institutional sites or contain viruses.
Tips to prevent these frauds
The specialist comments that “the more financial products we have, the greater the risks we run, which does not mean that we do not use them, but rather that we use them with adequate security”
For this, there are ways to prevent these crimes, but for Darío Vargas it is important to take into account four tips that will help prevent them.
The first thing is not to trust anyone, that is, if a friend or a contact asks you for information such as a PIN or password, even if you want to know if you have an account in a bank, be suspicious.
In the same way, it is important not to enter leagues that send you messages, it is better to ask what it is about and if you have any questions, you can directly call an official number of the bank or institution.
Another important point is to generate strong passwords, this means that preferably do not choose easy passwords such as dates of birth, data related to your name or that of a relative, etc., they must include lowercase, uppercase and special characters.
It is recommended to put different passwords on all your accounts, since it will be useless to have a strong password if you have the same one for all your accounts and services.
Another point that Darío Vargas highlights is using the tools that banking institutions provide on double-factor authentication, in which you access with the password and also generate a code that arrives through an email, message, a digital or physical token.
The last one is to use official portals or applications, since in the application stores you can have fake apps. Normally, the official sites contain the information of the official apps, what they are and where to download them.
“With these four things you have 80% of the problems covered, there are other types of problems such as theft of the phone or card, then you will have to call the bank to report this problem,” said Darío Vargas.
Above all, the specialist points out that it is important that if you have already been a victim of this type of crime, you report it to the authorities so that “the police can generate information patterns, identify these crimes and prevent them.”