Cybersecurity: ING warns against phishing

Are you an ING customer? Then you should be extremely careful with calls that are supposedly related to your account. The bank has warned its customers about phishing. Criminals are said to not only pretend to be employees of the company, but sometimes even police officers.

Theft of customer data

The scam sounds too simple to be promising. An alleged ING employee or a police officer calls bank customers to ask for their details. But as is so often the case with phishing, the criminals rely on quantity and call a large number of customers without further ado. Time and again, unsuspecting people fall into the fraudsters’ net.

In order to minimize the number of victims, the bank has now sent a warning message to its customers. It draws attention to the criminal activities and emphasizes that you should never give out your data over the phone or in any other way. Anyone who receives such a request should therefore be very skeptical and keep the data to themselves.

ING is a popular target

Unfortunately, this is not a first. ING has already been the victim of several cyberattacks. As these have increased massively in recent months and years, the bank has also reacted quickly. A look at the so-called phishing radar of the consumer advice center makes the problem clear. This regularly highlights the latest attacks by fraudsters. Just last week, PayPal was the focus of phishing attacks.

The criminals used the payment service’s new terms and conditions as a basis. The situation at ING was quite similar around two weeks ago. Here, the attackers used an allegedly new banking regulation as a pretext to scam customer data by e-mail. Now the fraudsters are clearly trying their luck by telephone. To avoid falling victim to phishing attacks, you should exercise caution not only with dubious phone calls, but also with e-mails.

Pay attention to the sender and how they are worded. In this regard, ING advises its customers to be skeptical if they are addressed impersonally, for example. Words that create a lot of pressure, such as “urgent need for action”, should also be questioned. In the best case scenario, however, you should simply keep your data to yourself at all times.