Six months after the introduction of the euro in our country, experts report an increase in digital payments. During the holiday and travel season, payments with a smartphone are the safest method, experts point out, but they also warn of frauds that we should be careful of, reports bTV.
“An unpaid fine has been detected“ – this is how fraudulent SMS messages from an unknown number, most often a foreign one, begin.
At the end of the message there is a link, and the sender urges us to follow it. It can take us to a website that is a copy of the official page of an institution such as the Traffic Police or the Ministry of Internal Affairs.
“This duplicate is well enough made to deceive us. There is still an element of haste. We have to quickly give our data, we are forced to give all our personal data. Then we get to the payment page and behind it is an actual payment system - a foreign one, of course, a scam run by these scammers," says Martin Bakardzhiev, Director of Cybersecurity and Fraud Prevention for Central and Eastern Europe at Visa.
“What we have been observing in the last few months is an increased trend of so-called smishing attacks - coming from SMS and phishing, the two words combined together. The concept of this type of attack is to steal data. They not only steal data, but also steal money in real time“, he points out.
Experts recall that when government institutions or courier companies want to contact us, they have clearly specified channels for this.
“They will not send us a text message from a foreign number that starts with +212, +213, +62. These are Indonesia and various African countries often. No government institution will send us a text message from such a number“, Bakardzhiev also says.
When a person notices that he has become the subject of online fraud, he should immediately contact his bank.
“Card payments themselves are extremely safe, but they are safe to the extent that we do not give our data. Just as the door at home is safe until we give our key to someone. When we give it the key, it no longer is safe. In the same way, we must store the data“, says Martin Bakardzhiev.
Even if we lose our device, the data from the card that is stored in it is protected, experts point out.
“The device is locked, so in any case the wallet will be protected. The card does not need to be reissued“, explains Bakardzhiev.
During the travel and vacation season, paying by card remains the most preferred.
“The safest way is certainly through the phone. And this is because of the system called tokenization. Here, the generated card stores the card data in the phone and every time a payment is made with a phone, smartwatch or other device, what the recipient of the payment sees – The POS terminal on the other hand, is not the card data, but a unique token for each individual transaction“, says the expert.
“Nearly half of payments – about 47-50%, are tokenized and there has been a very large growth in digital payments in general since the introduction of the euro“, he adds.
With the development of technology, there is also a growth in online fraud, and popular platforms even share photos of stolen cards and user data that can be used to make payments.
“With the advent of artificial intelligence, fraud mainly appears online. A very interesting type of fraud – a person sells something on a popular website and the buyer asks him for his card data in order to transfer money to him. There is no way someone would ask for my card data in order to transfer money to me. "The system doesn't work that way, but it's important for people to know that if I give my card details to someone, they won't transfer money to me, they'll take money from me," says Martin Bakardzhiev.
According to data from the Bulgarian National Bank, card payments for the first quarter were worth 4.6 billion euros.