Listen up, peeps! A new credit card scam has emerged.
On Monday (21st November), a Facebook user named Kelly Hoong took to her page to share a post detailing an incident that she encountered after receiving a dodgy SMS from RHB Bank, which she is not a customer of. As at time of writing, Hoong’s post has been shared over 1,900 times.
In her status, she wrote, “At 1:11pm today, I received an SMS from RHB bank claiming that I have a transaction from a premium watch shop in KLIA2. I have never owned an account with RHB, yet alone owning a CC (credit card). Obviously the amount displayed gave me quite a scare. I chose to ignore it but after a quick discussion with my colleagues, I decided to call the phone number displayed.”
At first glance, the above text message seemed like the typical kind of message you’d received after swiping your credit or debit card at a shop. But as Hoong doesn’t own an RHB account, she called the number provided in the SMS and a woman named “Summer” picked up. After listening to Hoong’s situation, “Summer” went on to ask for her phone number, reference code from the text, and the sender’s number.
“About 10mins later, she did call me back and told me that I have a credit card registered by my phone number and she mentioned my full name AND my house address too! Here, I would like to stressed to all my readers, I did not mention my full name to her at any time during our conversation!” she continued.
“Summer” then told Hoong that she owed the bank over RM8,000 and gave her the number of “Bank Negara Malaysia” (BNM), which was 03-27884726, urging her to “lodge a report”. Sounds familiar? That’s because the sequence is very similar to the BSN credit card fraud calls.
But luckily for Hoong, the number “Summer” provided couldn’t go through so Hoong decided to Google BNM’s other numbers. She stumbled upon a BNM article titled “Are you a victim of a credit card fraud?” and found her answer – “Summer” was working for the questionable syndicate all along. She eventually called BNM’s hotline, which starts with 1-300, and the customer service personnel told her that she is not the first victim to receive such text messages.
Another Facebook user known as Sunny Ng shared that he received a message saying that he made a transaction, amounting to RM4299, at KLIA. Other netizens also shared photos of scam messages they received recently and it all points to one similarity – the transactions were all made in KLIA or KLIA2.
See for yourself:
Swindlers nowadays are very clever and convincing, therefore we urge all our readers to be alert of this. Share this information with your family and friends because they need to know what’s going on.
Sources: Kelly Hoong’s Facebook page, Sunny Ng’s Facebook page.
