A faulty link masquerading as a Citizen’s Identity portal robbed a man of thousands

Chomutovskogo – A 48-year-old man from Chomutovskogo could lose more than 50 thousand crowns due to clicking on a fraudulent link. The person in question wanted to demonstrate to his friend how the “Citizen Identity” application, which he uses, works.

So, through his mobile phone, he entered the term “login citizen identity” into the web browser. He then clicked on the first link and was presented with a page that looked like a genuine Citizen Identity application. He logged in (verified his identity) using his internet banking.

Subsequently, a “spinning wheel” was shown on the display, as if the data was being loaded. “Because it took a long time, he thought his data was going crazy, turned off the page and didn’t pay any more attention to it. Immediately after, he received an SMS message from his bank with a security warning about adding a device to his banking. In total, he received about five of these messages by the evening, but he did not pay attention to them and did not read them,” police spokeswoman Miroslava Glogovská described the situation.

However, this was a big mistake, as it turned out later. The next evening, the man received an SMS message from the bank about the blocking of his payment card due to suspicious payments from his account. Since he had not entered any such payment, he immediately called his bank saying it was a fraud. At the request of the banker, he immediately deleted his internet banking application. Then he downloaded it again and the bank employee provided him with new login information. “She also told him that she had blocked another 10 unauthorized payments and an attempt to increase the limit to 100,000 crowns. When the person in question opened his bank account, he saw that an unknown fraudster had defrauded him of a total of 27,000 crowns in four payments. At the same time, he had other transactions in the amount of over 27 thousand crowns in blocked outgoing payments,” the spokeswoman added further details of the fraud case.

In retrospect, the defrauded man discovered that a page that looked the same as the official “Citizen Identity” website (where he logged into online banking) had a different URL than the official “Citizen Identity” website.

Fraud sites copy the entire content of the original site and can completely confuse users. It is therefore always necessary to check the URL for fraud.

In this case, it is a type of cyber attack, the so-called phishing, where users are unknowingly directed to a fraudulent website. Attackers create a duplicate of a pre-existing website, and Internet search engines sometimes begin to favor that website over the original legitimate website.

Therefore, whether you use “Citizen Identity” or other websites on which personal data (possibly including data for online banking) could be at risk in the event of their misuse, always make sure that the provider’s website displays the usual URL address (that it is not an imitation of a well-known site but owned by someone else).

If the URL does not match the official Internet address of the service you intend to use, leave the site immediately.