Scammers impersonate the Border Guard. “Hang up and don’t call back”

CERT is a team operating within the structures of NASK, established to respond to network security incidents. On Wednesday, the team issued a statement in which it warned against another method of fraud.

Scammers impersonate the Border Guard

“Attention! We warn you that cybercriminals impersonate the Border Guard. The team sensitizes to the way scammers operate. “They are calling from an unknown number, informing in English that there has been suspicious activity at the border and threatening to send an arrest warrant,” the statement reads.

What to do if we receive such a call? “It’s a scam, hang up and don’t call back,” CERT explains.

Scammers take advantage of the fact that in recent months there has been a lot of talk about the activities of the Border Guard, for example in connection with the tense situation on the Polish-Belarusian border.

More and more incidents

CERT draws attention to the growing activity of cybercriminals. Last year, the team handled 39,683 incidents, and this year it reported that more than 41,000 had already been recorded by mid-July.

Cybercriminals impersonate both public institutions and banks and companies, and then try to extort Poles’ data or money.

The new rules are intended to make it easier to fight fraudsters

At the last sitting, the Sejm adopted new regulations that are supposed to make it difficult to impersonate others in telephone conversations, i.e. the so-called spoofing, and in SMS, i.e. smishing. The Act imposes additional obligations on CSIRT NASK. The new tasks of the experts will include, among others: detecting known smishing patterns. There will also be a system enabling citizens to inform about a fraud attempt or the possibility of transferring data about a hacker campaign to the right place – especially to the police and mobile operators.

Moreover, NASK will keep a list of official names that public entities can use in SMS messages. This is to make it easier to detect counterfeit or similar-looking names that are often used by hackers. Telecoms will also introduce systems that automatically block fraud detected in databases as smishing: by NASK or the company’s security experts. In turn, in the case of spoofing, operators are obliged to actively block the so-called CLI Spoofing – even before the scammer starts talking to a potential victim.