"FBI Warns of 'Reverse' Instant Payments Phishing Schemes"

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) warns of a new phishing scheme aimed at tricking victims into making money transfers to accounts controlled by cybercriminals.  During the attacks, the adversaries target users of digital payment applications with fake text messages pretending to be from legitimate financial institutions, asking customers to verify they have initiated instant money transfers.  If the recipient responds to the automated text message, the criminals, "who typically speak English without a discernable accent," call the victim from a number that appears to match the legitimate 1-800 support number for the financial institution.  The adversaries claim to represent the organization's fraud department, and to establish credibility, they walk the victim through a process supposedly meant to "reverse" the fake instant payment transaction.  The FBI stated that the threat actors engaging in these attacks appear to have extensive knowledge of the victim's background information, including past addresses, Social Security numbers, the financial institution they are clients to, and the last four digits of their bank account numbers.  Using this information, customers are tricked into believing they are being walked through a legitimate process for retrieving stolen funds.  The victim is asked to remove their email address from their digital payment app and to share it with the cybercriminals, who add it to a bank account controlled by the threat actor.  After the email address has been changed, the actor tells the victim to start another instant payment transaction to themselves that will cancel or reverse the original fraudulent payment attempt.  The Bureau explained that they believe they are sending the transaction to themselves when the victims are actually sending instant payment transactions from their bank account to the actor-controlled bank account.

SecurityWeek reports: "FBI Warns of 'Reverse' Instant Payments Phishing Schemes"