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Bank teller helps end phishing scheme

Published: 22 Jan. 2010, 19:27

Lee Soo-jin

It was a peaceful morning at the Shinhan Bank branch in Cheonan, South Chungcheong, on Jan. 14, when bank teller Lee Soo-jin saw an elderly woman walking toward her window. The 83-year-old woman handed Lee a 30 million won ($26,654) bank check, and said she wanted to deposit the money into another bank account. With several clicks of her computer, Lee saw the woman had withdrawn the money on the previous day and then closed the account. Feeling that something was wrong, Lee asked the woman why she had closed the account so suddenly.

With that, Lee had taken the first step toward ending another “voice phishing” scheme that could have cost the woman her life savings.

In the scheme, the caller pretends to be a police officer, government official or bank employee, and requests enough personal information so they can withdraw money on the victims’ credit card or from a bank account.

The woman, flustered by Lee’s sudden interest, took out her cell phone to make a call. She told Lee she was talking to her “granddaughter,” who she said was the recipient of the money. But when she heard the woman using a form of address that Koreans use only with strangers or people older than they are, Lee grew suspicious. Despite Lee’s repeated questions, the woman insisted the money was for her granddaughter. Finally Lee sent the money to the mystery account. But she immediately reported the case to her boss and the audit inspector at the bank’s headquarters in Seoul, both of whom asked the woman about the recipient of the funds.

But Lee didn’t stop there. She went to the woman’s home, only to find she wasn’t there. The bank then filed a report with the police, who froze the telephone banking service on the woman’s account and asked the mystery account holder’s bank to freeze that account temporarily.

The police soon discovered the mystery recipient was indeed a perpetrator of voice phishing, posing as an experienced banking professional and promising high interest rates. The criminal even went so far as to ask the woman not to talk to or trust any other bank employees in order to get the promised high interest rates. It was the criminal’s idea to have her tell bank clerks that she was sending the money to her granddaughter.

Fortunately, the voice phishing criminal and his accomplices didn’t get the chance to withdraw the money because the police had their accounts frozen.

The woman’s family came to the bank next day to thank Lee over and over.

“Every employee at our bank is trained about what to do with potential voice phishing cases,” said Lee. “I did what I had to do.”

A total of 3,690 cases of voice phishing were reported in 2008, causing 18.6 trillion won in damages. From January to August 2009, 2,105 phone phishing cases, many targeting the elderly, were reported, worth around 10.2 billion won in losses.

By Kim Jung-kyu, Jung Ha-won [[email protected]]