AIB Customers targeted

AIB customers are again being targeted in a text message scam designed to trick people into revealing private details.




A spokesman for AIB confirmed it was seeing an increase in such attempts over the last number of weeks in what were the largest numbers since last August.



The scam directs recipients to websites designed to look genuine, such as aibsecure.com or aibsecurity.com, none of which are associated with the bank. Customers are asked to enter private details, a practice known as “phishing”.



A spokeswoman for the Irish Payment Services Organisation said phone numbers were likely bought or stolen from marketing databases. She also said although text message phishing was a much smaller industry than its email counterpart, there had been a handful of successful attempts. One of these cost a victim up to €30,000.



Customers are advised to delete messages immediately and not to reply to the sender. Replying will likely mark the entry as a “valid” number that is not disconnected and result in the customer receiving more messages.



AIB said it does not send out automated text messages to customers but that sometimes branch staff or an account manager might text a useful phone number to a customer. This usually follows a conversation with branch staff.



“There has been no security breach,” the bank said. “Fraudsters can randomly generate contact numbers or use publicly accessible ones . . . it's a numbers game hoping to catch people unawares.”



The bank said customers should never visit websites linked to text messages or emails.