News / Two victims of phishing fraud
SHETLAND police confirmed on Monday that two people had lost “a significant sum of money” after being targeted by fraudsters over the phone at the weekend.
Lerwick police station issued an urgent warning via local media on Sunday evening after eight people reported receiving fake calls from someone claiming to represent Santander bank.
Inspector Eddie Graham said that while four of those who contacted the police had recognised the call to be a fraud, four others had handed over details of their bank account to the caller.
Two of those four had lost money as a result, and were now in discussions with their bank to retrieve what they could.
Graham said Shetland appeared to have been specifically targeted by the same person over the weekend, who claimed there had been a security breach of their victim’s account.
“I am not aware why Shetland was the target, it may have been someone going through the phonebook and picking Shetland numbers at random,” he said.
“This was obviously a highly plausible individual who has been able to ‘phish’ account details from people.
“We wanted to highlight the dangers of this to the public, including emails purporting to be from banks asking them to link to web sites, which are dummies of the real thing.
“The message is clear: please, please if you have any doubts whatsoever, contact your bank directly and preferably face to face.”
Graham said that there had been no new reports since the alert went out.
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