Around 800 reports of phone calls made by scammers in October; some speaking in English
There has been a significant increase in fraud using English to scam people via a telephone call, RTL Nieuws reported. These are usually people pretending to work for a large global company like PayPal, eBay, Amazon, or Klarna to get the person’s bank account details.
The Fraud Help Desk received 800 reports of this type of fraud in the first half of October. A spokesperson confirmed that this was more than the whole month of September. “You could say this is a peak.”
According to the Fraud help desk, the criminals use what is called spoofing to show a different number than the one they are using to make the call. This is usually a Dutch number, as people are more likely to answer this. When the person answers the phone, they hear a tape, sometimes in English, in which somebody claims to be an employee of a large company.
The taped recording usually then warns the victim that an amount of money is about to be taken from their account before giving them an option menu, which, if pressed, sends the victim to a real person who then continues the conversation. The scammer sometimes asks the victim to download a program to their computer so that they can fix the issue, but in reality, the program can see everything the person is doing on their computer and uses this to obtain their information.
"We are currently receiving a lot of calls about this. In most cases, people want to know whether they have done the right thing. Several people have indicated that they have been given access to their computers, and some have suffered financial damage. Fortunately, most of them hang up,” the Fraud Help Desk
