Recently, OCBC Bank issued an urgent warning about phishing scams attempting to impersonate the bank. These phishing scams impersonate the OCBC SMS service, making it convincing that the sender (scammer) appears to be the same as the actual OCBC SMS notifications.
Personally, I have received such a phishing message and it took me another second to scruntinise and to realise that it was a scam SMS that I was receiving.
Take a look at the messages below and ask yourself if you would have spotted the scam immediately? Do note, the scam SMS may appear to be sent under “OCBC”. It was in my case.
The sender claimed to be “OCBC” but what gave it away was the fact that I did not add any payees, and that the link directed me to a suspicious link: payee-ocbc.com. The official OCBC website is ocbc.com.
This phishing scam has been so convincing that according to an OCBC news alert sent out yesterday, 450 customers have lost more than $8.5 million to such scams from between 8 and 29 December.
If you or your loved ones receive any suspicious SMS, here’s what to look out for:
Personally, we think the best advice here is never to click on any links that you get in SMS. Instead, go 1) directly to the bank’s website by typing the URL on your browers or 2) through the official OCBC app.
Stay safe, and share this information with all your loved ones so that they too won’t fall prey to these scams.
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