According to a survey conducted for Facile.it by the research institute mUp Research, in the last year alone, over 1.8 million Italians were victims of fraud or, again, attempted fraud in the field of current accounts. All for a total economic damage estimated at more than 1.1 billion euros. The study revealed that among the channels most used by workers are fake emails (36% of cases) and text messages (34.4%). In more than 1 in 4 cases (28.8%), however, the scam occurred through a telephone call, while in 16% of cases it came from a counterfeit website.
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These are not the only ways chosen to defraud. Scams can also pass through the most common instant messaging applications, including WhatsApp and Telegram (11.2% of cases). These are tools that are often used simultaneously, thanks also to the increasingly predominant combination of artificial intelligence which, as in the case of Fideuram, allows people's voices to be cloned, making scams increasingly sophisticated and difficult to recognise, not only for consumers, but also for companies and institutions.
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Considering ordinary citizens, there are specific types of people that criminals prefer to target. However, those who most frequently suffer a scam or attempted fraud linked to current accounts are not the elderly, as one might imagine, but rather young people in the 25-34 age group but especially those between 35 and 44 years old. How do victims behave after being lured by scammers? Almost 1 in 3 (32.8%) prefer not to report the fraud. The main reasons with which they try to justify this behavior, the survey underlines, concern the fact that "the economic damage was low" (46.3% of cases) and the fact that "one felt naive to have fallen into the trap" (14.6% of cases).
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Given these premises, how is it possible to understand in good time if you are the victim of a scam? The experts at Facile.it have drawn up a short handbook with some tips to avoid running into online fraud when using a current account. The first important point is to pay particular attention to phishing. If you receive an email from your bank requesting information about your current account such as, for example, home banking user and password, you must ignore the communication, but also delete it immediately. This is a very specific fraud attempt through a technique used by cyber criminals to deceive personal information. Basically, in fact, the bank will never ask for personal information or access data and passwords linked to your current account via email.
Another useful trick is to activate text or app notifications for your current account too. In fact, several credit institutions offer their customers to activate this specific function which allows them to be alerted in the event of suspicious movements on their current account. This applies not only to the use of credit or debit cards, but also to any other operation, such as a bank transfer, a RID or other direct debits. By doing this you will be able to know in real time what is happening and, if you have any doubts, you can notify the bank and ask to block the account.
Experts still recommend trying to verify the identity of the interlocutor. Considering, in fact, that AI can duplicate a person's voice, if you receive a suspicious phone call, you must always understand well who you are talking to before concluding any economic transaction. The simplest solution is to contact the person in question yourself using the official number: whether it is a company, or a relative, if you call the correct number yourself, you can be sure that it is not a virtual "clone". If you are communicating with a website bot, be careful of clones: it is better to check that the site address is correct and that it contains the acronym "https". In this case the information sent to the platform is encrypted and, consequently, protected from possible intrusions. Furthermore, it is better to proceed with similar operations only when you are connected to the web from a protected network (your home or mobile line) and never from public networks, because there could be criminals capable of intercepting the data and then appropriating it.
Another useful piece of information to know, for those who may be unaware, is that the system known in jargon as "Strong customer authentication" has been active for a few years, which requires the credit institution to carry out a double verification of the user's identity, through two or more independent factors, before definitively confirming the requested operations. The idea is to minimize the risks for all consumers.
Then there is an increasingly common scam which is that of fake payments. The victim is an unsuspecting citizen who, for example, wants to sell an object on the web via the most used buying and selling platforms. The scammer pretends to purchase the item and, when he has to indicate the payment method, tries to convince the seller of the existence of a new procedure which, through an ATM circuit, allows you to shorten the timeframe and immediately receive the money in your current account. The problem is that through this method the money, instead of being paid into the seller's account, is withdrawn from the seller and credited to the scammer's account or prepaid card.
Fraud often affects ordinary citizens but not only. The case involving Massimo Moratti dates back to 2023, when the scammers contacted several entrepreneurs pretending to be the Minister of Defense Guido Crosetto, with a cloned voice and with the request for an urgent contribution to be able to finance the operations to free Italian hostages in the Middle East. Another famous attempt failed when a Ferrari manager received WhatsApp messages from a fake CEO, Benedetto Vigna. Afterwards, a phone call came. The voice sounded like Vigna's, but it was created with AI, and asked to prepare a secret financial operation.
