Vishing

There are mainly two categories of people to whom I don’t like to speak over phone. One is Telemarketing people and then the so called Customer Care Support (especially when technical issues sorted out by females). One of my friends is into Telemarketing and no offence meant to her. (The other day I had to deal with some customer care people to fix some issues related to my broadband. The first support executive, a lady, made it worse and messed everything up)….ok, so Vishing…what is that?

Most of us are aware of Phishing, which is mail based fraud and criminal activity. This Vishing is the telephonic version of that. It is a combination of ‘Voice’ and ‘Phishing’ hence Vishing.

They use the VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol – a protocol used to transmit voice through internet) and IVR (Interactive Voice Response – the typical ‘press one to hear your account info or nine to speak to a customer care executive’ kinda software stuff) Many people around the world got cheated by Vishing. And this fraud is picking up fast.

Here, you get a call telling there is some problem with your credit card (in most of the cases, sometimes it can be insurance, vehicle related things etc). In general, they won’t tell which card bearing what number. Sometimes it can be a message left in your voice box/answering machine asking you to call back to a toll free number. Usually, it is recorded voice (this can give a better (though fake) authenticity and then you can’t record the caller’s original voice). Before we speak to the customer care support, we will be asked to enter our credit card info, PIN etc (sometimes they even collect the postal address, pretending as verification)….when all the info is entered, its all over and the person who entered is in big financial trouble…

These guys change their telephone number (from where the call originate), location etc very professionally. They use Caller ID spoofing so that the number displayed on our Caller ID will be wrong. So its not easy for us to trace them. So the best defense against Vishing is to ignore them. Or if you want to clear your doubt, call up the credit card company directly, ALWAYS…