“It all started with a call on my cell phone, with an email message, explains the Brainois. The machine said that it was my bank – without specifying its name – that my credit card had been hacked and that I needed to call Card Stop urgently. The Card Stop number was repeated several times for me to note and call. Which I did without delay.”
In reality, this number starting with 071 was not that of Card Stop. While dialing it, the Brainois came across another machine, which offered several choices. “To deactivate your card, press 2…” There followed some waiting music, before coming across a flesh-and-blood interlocutor.
Stanislas de Lantheere explained that he had just received a message, and that he wanted to have his card blocked. On the other end of the line, the person asked for his name, and confirmed that the credit card had just been used, from the Czech Republic, to order mobile phones.
-The interlocutor asked him if he was in the Czech Republic and the Brainois replied negatively. He was then invited to activate Itsme on his mobile phone, to transmit his identifiers and interrupt the operation. “At that moment, my son Romain verified that the number given to me was indeed that of Card Stop, explains the boss of 421. He showed me on his cell phone that this was not the case, and that it was a scam. I then asked the person on the phone to wait, that I wanted to check if I was really dealing with Card Stop. She put pressure on me, saying that a transaction was in progress with my bank card and that if I waited, I would be charged, too bad for me… I realized it was weird, I hung up .”
Stanislas de Lantheere then used his phone again, but this time to contact his bank directly. The CBC confirmed to him that it was a scam, recommending for the future to never use Itsme without being at the origin of the banking transaction. The testimonies collected at the bottom of the video posted online by the Brainois show that quite a few victims fell into the trap. “My colleague was called three times in the afternoon by these same scammers, explains Stanislas de Lantheere. I don’t know how they get the numbers but the scam is well done. The electronic message, Card Stop, a person asking to use Itsme… All this builds confidence and in the heat of the moment, we no longer think too much. If my son hadn’t been there, I’d be fooled and my account could be drained. I will file a report with the police tomorrow. But immediately, I wanted to warn as many people as possible via social networks. There seem to be a lot of cases at the moment.”
