Protecting Yourself From A Recent Bank Of Ireland Text Scam
Highlights from The Pat Kenny Show- 1,182 views
- 10 Sep 2020
Jess Kelly joined Pat on the show today to give advice on how to protect yourself from a Bank Of Ireland text scam that has been recently been doing the rounds.
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That Pat Kenny show on Newstalk. No Bank of Ireland has confirmed it is aware that some customers have reported a delay in receiving payments into their accounts this morning. Our technology correspondent Jess Kelly has the details. Jess, good morning. Good morning. Pass.
So what's going on? Who's not getting the money?
It seems like a significant portion of Bank of Ireland customers have been impacted today. A lot of people who were due to receive their social welfare payments and indeed their salaries, their wages from their employers have taken social media to express their frustration at not receiving the payments. This is not the first time that this has happened. Other banks have encountered this in the past. Bank of Ireland are saying that they are aware of the issue and they are working to resolve it as quickly as possible.
It does seem to be an issue on their side of things, but want to sort of warn people about his that outgoing payments have also been affected. So if, like me, your rent is due today or anything like that. Just be mindful of the fact that those payments may be delayed and they are hopeful that it will be back up and running by the end of today. But we're still not 100 percent sure in terms of what the what the actual issue is.
OK, but you can't do anything about it. There's nothing you can do. I mean, can you log on to your account?
Yes, you can log on to your banking 365. Or if you have the Bank of Ireland up, you can log in. And unfortunately, you can see that the money isn't there. If you were expecting some, you can still go through the steps as if to process a payment. But it is taking time for a payment to leave your account and going to the destination account. As I said, it's one of those very frustrating, frustrating things that happens.
And it's obviously a consequence of us using these tax systems to to process banking and hopefully it'll be resolved before long, usually that they can be quite quicker turning these things around. You may remember other banks previously having serious issues whereby ATMs weren't reading cards, online payments weren't going through and so on. So it's not the first time, but it doesn't make it any easier for the people impacted today.
Now, to complicate matters, there's also a Bank of Ireland scam doing the rounds as well. What is that?
This is a very worrying one, because you and I over the years have talked through some phishing scams and some phishing sums. And that's the ones whereby you get a text and SMS text. And, you know, to begin with, they all started out of, you know, a prince in a certain part of the world has a million euro. When he wants to give it to you, all you have to do is put it in your bank details.
We all kind of wise up to that fairly sharpish. And we knew that that was not the case and we could disregard them. But there's a tax going around today and it says and this is the quote of the tax that says Your bouy online access is disabled by unusual activity. To restore your account, follow the steps on the link. And then there's a link that includes 365 online secure info dot com for Slashdot IHI. And if you receive that, you may well think it looks at Gitmo because it is one of the more sophisticated looking ones that I have come across.
But the giveaway for me when I saw it straight away was that instead of it being w w w dot three six five, it actually is w w w hyphen three, six five.
But everything about it, if you look at the text, if you were to scan the text, it was to pop up on your lock screen, on your phone and you were just to sort of glance at it. I could see people buying into this. Bank of Ireland has confirmed that this is a scam text and it's not the only one going around purporting to be Bank of Ireland at the moment. And the issue is that we are doing more and more of our banking online.
So when you see these texts on actually going to break out your magnifying glass and go Google, you know, Magnum P.I., honest, you could easily click onto a link and then that's when you can fall into some form of trouble.
OK, it is worrying, just looking at that link w w w dash 365 online secure info, dot com forward slash, i.e. not data.
So presumably, you know when you get dot com or something after it, I don't know how all this works.
Yeah. That, not, that is not necessarily a telltale sign because sometimes if you go to say Amazon, for example, there would be Amazon.com and then there could be a backslash IEEE and take you to the Irish portal. You know, we've spoken through how to identify some of these scams. For me, as I mentioned, it was the w w w dash that that was a trigger for me. We know when you are on a computer, if you're on a website, on a browser, always, always, always look for the padlock symbol in the in the Web address browser.
If you are putting in any form of credit card information, if you are getting and I hadn't heard of these in quite a while, but I heard of one last week, you know, people calling, saying we're calling from Microsoft. We hear that you are working from home at the moment, but there's an issue with your account. Give us your account information and we will rectify it. Those type of scam calls are coming back. And because we are all working in.
Ways and changed ways, some people are falling for them, and it's only afterwards that they catch themselves thinking, oh, hang on a second thought was a scam. If you have fallen for any of these scams, there are things that you can do. Firstly, the ideal scenario is that you don't engage with them.
And if you're not sure if a text or an email is legitimately from whomever they're purporting to be, call the service provider, call, you know, whether is you're buying your energy provider, your broadband provider, call them and try and verify it. They won't mind taking that call at the next thing. Then if you have clicked on a link and something has downloaded onto your phone or your computer or you think that your account has been compromised in some way, shape or form, download.
Firstly, I would download something like Avgi, which is the antivirus software, and have that on your device anyway. It's available for both phones and for laptops. And Ron, that and it'll pick up if there's any malware on the device as a result, I would then recommend that you ensure that your account is fully secure. So make sure that your passwords have been updated and they are. It's not password one, two, three, which is still one of the most popular passwords in the world, do stuff like that to try and protect yourself.
If you notice that money has been taken or that there's unusual activity going on and none of your accounts flagged it with your bank as soon as possible because they can put a block on payments being processed, they can identify unusual activity and they can prevent it, meaning that you won't be out of pocket. I know myself. I had my card skimmed online a few months back around Christmas of last year, and thankfully my bank was able to block the card polls, all activity, and then I was reimbursed for the monies taken.
But you need to know that this is happening to be able to report it on there and then get your money back.
And some of the online scams, they're so sophisticated now, so don't feel silly. If you have fallen victim to one, just do something about it and hopefully get your money back if money has been taken.
Jess Kelly, our technology correspondent, thank you very much.
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