Bavaria’s special public prosecutor’s office for online crime has observed a new wave of phishing. “Access data for online banking is fished out, then the perpetrators gain access to a push TAN by calling the victims and using a pretext to get them to send the push TAN to the perpetrators,” said senior public prosecutor Thomas Goger. He is the deputy head of the Cybercrime Central Office based in Bamberg. Virtual debit cards would then be set up using this data to activate payment systems. “The account is cleared out within a very short time because there is hardly any limit. You can basically use the virtual debit card in the same way as a bank card,” Goger continued.
However, he has now gained the impression that the banks and savings banks have tightened their own security measures in order to better protect customers. In addition, the central office has conducted a whole series of successful investigations in this area of crime, “in which individual perpetrators or small groups of perpetrators with moderate IT knowledge have really stolen six-figure sums within a very short period of time.”
The Bavarian Cybercrime Central Office was set up in 2015. The public prosecutors fight many forms of crime on the Internet – such as fake shops, software for illegally encrypting company data or the distribution of child pornography.