Cyber scams have multiplied in recent years, and much of this is due to their sophistication in the sense that nowadays there are barely any errors or details that give away that it is a hoax, in addition to the fact that criminals have increasingly more information about their potential victims to create more realistic scams.
One of the areas where cybercrime is on the rise is through social networks and messaging apps, and a huge vein has been detected in WhatsApp, as it is the most used platform.
Attackers have numerous techniques to obtain personal data or money from their victims, among the most popular are identity thefts and for months there has been a rise in attacks that empty your bank account by taking advantage of a WhatsApp feature.
The Meta messaging app offers users numerous ways of communication, including video calls. These offer users several tools to improve calls, among them is the option to share screen which, although it can be very useful for certain cases, has been discovered that it is a button that can lead to the theft of all our savings.
The screen share option is a function that allows us to show someone else what appears on our screen, so that the content of your smartphone is duplicated on the other person’s device. As has been warned by the Russian bank Sberbank, there is a new scam that exploits this function to empty our bank account.
How this scam works
Like the vast majority of cyber scams, cybercriminals contact the victim pretending to be someone they are not, in this case, they do it by impersonating your bank, for this reason both the profile picture and the associated name correspond to your bank, although the phone number is likely to be foreign.
In the conversation, they will tell us that there was some error with our bank account, with the card, they will assure us that a significant charge has been debited which is being held pending our confirmation or any other problem that requires immediate action.
To solve this problem, our supposed bank will indicate that the best solution is to make a video call. If we accept, we will immediately receive a video call from another number, this does not match the one that started the conversation, and we will discover that the caller does not have the camera on, they will likely tell us that it is broken or something similar.
Their goal will be to convince us to activate the screen sharing button, claiming that this way they can help us solve the problem. If we follow their instructions and enter our access codes into our bank’s app, the cybercriminals can steal our password and from there access our account and rob all our money.
While it is true that in most banking apps biometric data is required to access (fingerprint or facial recognition) there are cases where they ask for our access code. Avoiding this scam is as simple as not sharing your screen with anyone other than trusted and close people.
