Last year, more than 41 million euros in damage due to fraud was reported to the Fraud Help Desk. This is a strong increase compared to 2019, when the desk received more than 26 million euros in reports.
The Fraud Help Desk points out that criminals are increasingly able to loot personal data with which they can convincingly pose as someone else.
This is done, among other things, by ‘phishing’ (sending a deceptively genuine link to, for example, a bank account, which actually gives the scammer access to his victim’s personal information) or by recording a telephone conversation.
Through knowledge of personal financial information or of someone’s voice, criminals are increasingly able to impersonate others. An increasingly common form of fraud is the request for help via WhatsApp: the number of reports thereof quadrupled or fivefold last year, says a spokesperson for the Fraud Help Desk.
In this form of fraud, someone poses as a known or family member, for example as a son or daughter, with an app about a new telephone number and a story about the missing or theft of the old telephone. The scammer then asks his victim to supposedly advance the rent or mortgage; if someone does that, the money disappears into the account of a ‘cat catcher’, an accomplice who has made his account number available for this purpose. In many cases the victim has lost his money.
Responding to current events
The spokesperson cannot explain the sharp increase in the total amount of damage, because the reporting center has not investigated this. However, the Fraud Help Desk received many more reports last year, which means that the total amount is also much higher.
There also seems to be a connection with the corona crisis: since it broke out in March, there has been a spike in the number of reports and this may be due to the fact that from that moment on, much more shopping was done online.
It is possible that people who have less experience with this are more likely to be victims of scammers, who in turn responded to current events by offering scarce and popular products such as masks, disinfectant gel or sportswear. People who ordered such articles never received them after payment, and the ‘supplier’ was nowhere to be reached.