Phishing Through VoIP, How Scammers Do It?

Technology is a boon to the generation but also a bane, sometimes a very dangerous one too. As technology is developing, our life is becoming easier and so as the security of our protected goods, hard to breakthrough. But with highly developed security systems formed by humans, humans also has equally developed means to break through such security systems. Phishing is one such security breakthrough to extort all your valuable information.

Phishing is a cybercrime where the scammer sends you an email or a voicemail making it appear as it is sent by a legitimate source or financial company or any online true retail outlet. Mostly, these messages would inform you of the problem in the account and you will be asked to give your personal data like your credit number or CVV. Many customers have been tricked by the scammers in a similar way only to lose their money being drained out of their credit card. There are several forms of phishing, of which the rate of VoIP phishing is increasing every day. The speedy increase in the rate of VoIP phishing is because, it is easy to process, cost-efficient and very hard to detect at the same time.

What is VoIP?

Voice over Internet Protocol or VoIP is a group of technology where voice communication and other multimedia resources through internet protocol. Many companies and business organization still use the traditional method on phones and VoIPs to make calls, video conferences, and other things. That is why scammers took up the idea of phishing through VoIP. VoIP phishing, also known as vishing, is a criminal cyber practice that uses VoIP system to acquire confidential data relating to financial information of the customer. Vishing is a more efficient way to scam than normal phishing strategies like sending fraudulent emails etc. Most of the times, we do not even open the spam emails in our account and the efforts of the scammer to steal our data go to waste. Now a day’s scammers take up vishing campaigns as it is more efficient due to the following reasons:

• It is easy to create fake caller ID:

The rate of increasing vishing scams is due to the ease in technology where cybercriminals can easily hide and do not allow tracking of their numbers to avoid the risk of detection. Scammers create fake caller IDs. And they call you or any of your employees to act as any high bank official or anyone holding a government office. They ask you about all your important information (mostly financial), only to drain away all the money in your bank or use this personal information against you. They act as if it a matter of grave seriousness to extract all your critical information to use it later for their own use. Scammers also manipulate local numbers which seem to be from multinational banks, to use it for various VoIP scams.

• VoIP is easy to operate for scams but difficult to detect:

As a cybercriminal who perform VoIP scams, are not geniuses and the skills of VoIP deployments or making personal phone calls to the customers to run away with money do not require high intellectual capability. Only the knowledge of basic VoIP setup is enough for such scams. VoIP hardware like IP phones and routers are affordable and easily accessible. Hackers easily connect these devices to their PCs to record and steal information from phone calls. They use fake caller IDs to make such calls and they are very difficult to track because the user may destroy the ID anytime according to their convenience. Moreover, with the use of voice changing technologies that are easily accessible, a vishing scam is not rocket science to perform.

• VoIP scamming is affordable:

Scammers use traditional phones for vishing. The cost of phones and limited extra charges for the scam is really less compared to the profit made by scamming innocent customers. Cybercriminals resort to VoIP scams due to its cost-efficiency. Vishing scammers won’t leave any room to attack your system using VoIP channels for their profit through their sneaky and resourceful ways.

• Scammers tamper with caller IDs:

Vishing scammers do not even need to destroy a number to prevent the risk of getting detected. The scammers rather tamper with the caller ID, so as to trick users to think that they are talking to legitimate company staff or bank officials and ironically sometimes as a fraud investigator.

• VoIP exposes the list of potential victims:

With the help of VoIP, the scammers send a message to hundreds of people in a go. To the list of people who are sent this message, the scammers target their potential victim.

To prevent being the victim of any VoIP phishing, manage your office voice communications hosted by a trusted service provider. Do not call any number provided in an email or phone call regarding security issues of your bank account or any financial card. Only call on the official number in the official site of your bank. In case, you receive such a malicious call, it is always better to visit the bank personally to stay on the safe side. Make sure to link your phone numbers and email ID with your bank account so that they can inform you of any suspicious transaction from your card, so as to take any necessary actions.

Conclusion:

Technology has obviously highly advanced but so as people’s evil intentions. It is always good to play safe when it comes to matter that deals with your finance and professional life. Phishing is not new and VoIP phishing is easy to set which makes it easier to scam innocent people. There’s exactly no technical support to prevent VoIP phishing completely. A little presence of mind and common sense to detect and survive in such a situation can only help. As customers, we are most vulnerable to VoIP phishing and only awareness and little smartness can help us from possibly getting robbed.

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