South Korea's financial watchdog on Monday launched a fresh campaign to eradicate phone scams known as "voice phishing," calling for banks and other financial institutions to make more efforts to protect their customers.
Such scams involve the use of fraudulent phone calls that trick people into giving away private financial information, enabling scammers access to their accounts.
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(Yonhap) |
The Financial Supervisory Service's monthlong campaign calls for employees of banks and other financial institutions to take more precautionary measures to prevent such scams.
When customers make financial transactions online, a pop-up window with a precautionary warning against phone scams will appear, the regulator said in a statement.
Despite efforts to prevent phone scams, the number of voice phishing scams is on the rise.
According to the FSS data, a total of 21,006 people fell prey to voice phishing scams during the first six months of this year, up 56.4 percent from the previous year.
The number of scam cases jumped 53.7 percent on-year to more than 16,338 in the January-June period, and the total amount of damages incurred spiked 73.7 percent to 180.2 billion won ($162.2 million). (Yonhap)
