If you don’t want to lose your money, you’d better learn how to catch scammers because they are now the master of disguise. If you are careless and far behind them, you can be their victim. Anyway, fake can never be real and we’ll be able to catch many suspicious areas if we are conscious, noticeable and calm. Here are some tips to distinguish an original product from a counterfeit or to identify fake and real matters.

Fraud SMS

The criminals nowadays are professional. They send scam SMS to you on behalf of a bank, a reliable organization, or your familiar phone number. However, some suspicions are obvious as the text messages normally make you worry and curious, or create excitement and contentment as if you’ll receive an award or privilege, and rush you to do something like updating information; otherwise, your account will be invalid, click to get a free gift, seduce you to click attached link to fill in personal data. Fake mail will request full details like ID No., Credit Card No., Bank Account No., Birthdate, ATM code, Password, and OTP while the regular bank asks for name, last name, phone number, and email. If you accidentally click the fraud link, you’ll see strange and imitating bank websites such as scbpl.com, scb77.44, lifescb.com, scb.gdscba.com. Those are absolutely scam websites.

Fake website

The official and reliable website starts with https:// with a key icon in front. Once clicked, the system will pass on information on that website to a security password, verify your right, and the completeness of the information. For your confidence, you may check the URL of the bank or organization at first. Some URLs can identify the country where a website is registered such as https://www.scb.co.th = Thailand, sg = Singapore, uk = England, ch = China, etc. For URL with suffixes such as .com, .net or other without country suffix, you may check the website information at https://www.whois.com/whois/ which identifies where that website is registered and who is its owner. If it is an international website, you should suspect that it is fake. When you click it, you’ll be asked to fill in in-depth personal data like ID No., Credit Card No., Birthdate, Password, OTP code. If you find such a website, you should doubt that it’s unusual. The bank generally requests only basic information such as name, last name, email, and phone number.

Fake Line

It is easy to spot fake Lines such as SCB Line which includes SCB Thailand and SCB Connect. The real identity has a green or blue shield in front, but the grey shield or no shield is surely the fake Line. Fake Line normally starts chatting first and users will see ‘Add friends’ on top which means the user and this account haven’t yet been friends. For a real Line, the user must personally add friends and cannot chat with any customer first while a fake Line is a real conversation. Most bank officials don’t talk to customers directly. The language used in fake Line is mostly full of spelling mistakes and blunt sentences. Customer in-depth data will be asked with information of the bank where the customer is holding, a link is attached for accessing to fraud website or application in order to hack the victim’s bank account. If you receive a fake Line, please click ‘Report problem’ immediately to block that account. To ensure that your current account is real and safe, you should add friends with companies or brands that you are their direct customer through reliable sources such as shops or brand official accounts to survive cyber criminals.

Fraud Facebook

Fraud Facebook seems like a real one and its posted message also looks real so you may not know that it’s fake at a glance. Anyway, fraud is never genuine. If you carefully notice, you can easily catch a dubious FB. The real FB shows a verified badge or a blue checkmark after the name, and the spelling of the page name must be correct. The fraud page is likely to use imitating names almost similar to the real page but it contains special signs like comma (,), full stop (.), or unique characters like English letters which may mislead you. Another noticeable point is that the real number of bank FB fan pages is about a million, for example, SCB gains 3.9 million fan pages while the fake one has only hundreds. On a real page, each brand post gains the average amount of Likes and Comments while there is little or no Like and Comments on a fake page so you can assume that it’s the imitating page created by the scammers.

Spam email 

The bank has no policy to ask customers to disclose ID No., PIN code, or important information through email. For an email that requests you to disclose personal data such as Password, Bank Account No., secret information or any email sent to you in order to update information or make a confirmation statement, or provide the attached link with email and ask you to click another website or send you an unusual message, please remember not to reply that email, and don’t click any suspicious link or file. Just delete it! If you are in doubt or have any questions, please forward that scam email to security@scb.co.th, the bank will reply to you whether it is a phishing email.

Scam App

Scam App is now spreading widely and normally comes with fraud SMS or Line with a link for downloading scam App. They deceive you with many scammed offers, for example, offering loans with special interest rates and you have to click the link for downloading the loan App. If you click download, it’ll take you to the App without direct passing through App Store, Play Store, or Huawei App Gallery. More notification, scam App is mostly specific like loan App with unreliable description (sometimes in Thai but general App is English) and no App detail given such as the number of reviewers, the size of a file, the number of downloads, and no rating info.

No matter tricks the scammers have attacked us, we have to be conscious, careful, and observable so that we can trace fraudulent offers through online channels.

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