Scam calls lock out phone subscribers

Khan said the call came from an unknown number, saying: “Your subscriber will be blocked in two hours. Click 0” for more information.

“When I saw that the voice on the phone was the same as the messages on the panel, I thought I should investigate,” Khanh said. He was contacted by a person impersonating the network operator in a threatening tone. Remembering previous phone scams and the number that came at the same time was weird, he began to suspect it was a scam so he didn’t go any further. When he called the operator’s panel, he found that the account was completely normal and unblocked.

Similarly, Tu Ha (Cau Giay, Hanoi) said she was also a victim of deception. “They told me they found my subscriber spreading fraudulent messages, so they will block him in two hours. Ha said.

They claim they didn’t, but the other end continues to threaten to suspend the subscription, saying they have proof. Under the guise of customer service, this person suggested calling a “legal help number.” She agreed it was a very important phone number and should be used often.

On the other side of the second call, he claimed to be the police and asked them to confirm their identity by providing their full name, national identification number, date of publication, etc. “After seeing on the phone that I After reading personal information, a colleague sitting next to me expressed suspicion and asked me to turn off the phone. Until then, I didn’t think I was still being scammed.” It wasn’t until she asked for the number that she realized it wasn’t a law enforcement number. Two hours later, Ha’s phone is still working normally and isn’t shutting down like a threat.

Ngo Minh Hieu, a security engineer at the National Cyber​​Security and Surveillance Center (NCSC), believes this is actually a ploy to steal users’ personal information.

“Following such threats, many malicious individuals unknowingly disclose personal information. This leads to many dire consequences, from personal information to possibly stolen property,” the expert said.

According to Mr. Hugh, these techniques have actually been around for a long time, but the situation is constantly changing, making users unpredictable. For example, in the previous example, a common scenario would be “notifying a user who caused an accident in Danang” or “investigating involvement in a serious matter”. Since the current phone registration is also one of the user’s valuable assets, lately some bad guys use threats to lock the registration. Usually the number is called from abroad, not Vietnam’s +84.

A network operator representative has confirmed that such incidents are fake, as this is not the behavior of the network operator. Subscribers who have fully registered their information and paid according to the rules do not have a common lock. In the past, many pretended to be network operators and used the “4G SIM change” trick to trick users into providing information or texting in order to get their phone number.

Security expert Ngo Minh Hieu advises users not to share personal information on social networks or other online platforms and not to follow requests from strangers, such as download download links. , login details, bank accounts… so criminals don’t use them to scam their fortunes.

According to statistics from the Department of Telecommunications of the Ministry of Information and Communications, by September 2021. Network operators in Vietnam blocked tens of millions of fake calls. The number of fake calls received each month runs into the millions.

The agency mentioned that the Vietnamese country code is 84 and that when a user receives a call or SMS from a phone number that begins with “+” or “00,” the remaining two numbers are not “84,” but international numbers could be. Users should only call back or follow up if they know the number is for a relative abroad.

Lu Kui