A month ago, the Spanish government approved a package of measures that included the launch of a food purchase check for families worth 200 euros. It did not start off on the right foot, due to the bureaucratic complexity involved in its request, and that from Genbeta we tried to solve by publishing a tutorial on the subject.
However, the Internet also teems with many people willing to take advantage of the confusion about this check to your own advantage. In fact, the Internet User Security Office has already detected and spread the sending of fraudulent SMS messages that try to impersonate the Tax Agency to steal personal and bank data.
The message in question, spread by the Civil Guard on Twitter, reads as follows:
“Tax Agency notifications: we have not been able to process the aid of 200 euros to your bank account, due to the lack of payment information, update from here: [URL]”.
Poor SMS wording is already suspect… although, as we have recently said in other articles, it is not an infallible criterion: more and more campaigns of this kind present a perfect spelling.
In any case, as you can imagine, once the naive victim of the SMS clicks on the link seeking to solve the false incident reported in it, they will fall headlong into a social engineering scam aimed at extracting personal and banking information.
Specifically, you will find yourself before a website that pretends to belong to the Tax Agency and in which you will be asked, among other information, card number, card security code and PIN. Here’s a screenshot of it:
fake website
To complete the deception, once you enter your data, the fraudulent web redirects you to the real portal of the Tax Agency.
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What do I do if I have already been a victim?
If you have already been a victim of this scam or one similar, the measures to adopt according to the Internet User Security Office are the following:
- The first step must be contact your bankto report what happened and block any movement made without our authorization.
- Update PIN and security codes of the card.
- Even if you had not suffered any irregular movement before reporting what happened to the bank, you have to be attentive in the following months to the appearance of any possible irregularity.
- Collect all evidence possible to have been a victim of the scam to Report it to law enforcement.
- Henceforth, in case of doubt, contact the institution that theoretically has contacted you by another means (in this case, the Tax Agency) in order to verify the message received.
⚠️#ALERT ‼️ Campaign detected #smishing supplanting the Tax Agency. Request to update the payment information to receive financial aid of €200 from the Government. #NoPiquesthe objective of the fraud is to steal personal and bank data.https://t.co/e8hexhXPb5 pic.twitter.com/MPcH5rUK6f
— Civil Guard 🇪🇸 (@guardiacivil) March 3, 2023
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