Team Partners Telecommunications

Mobile phone and bank card security

Posted on Oct 21, 2022  | Tags: security

We’re having a break-away this month, we’ll return to the subject of cyber-crime in November, but right now we want to alert you to something that caught our attention recently and that we feel should be shared widely. Have a read and see if you agree.

Allow us to start with a question: Do you ever keep your mobile phone and credit / debit card in the same place? Somewhere if you lose one, you’d lose the other…or if one was to pick up one, the other would go too? Because that’s what a lot of us do, often our cards are carried in our mobile phone cover, and we think we’re safe in doing this, other than if we misplace our phone, we’re seriously inconvenienced.

Sadly, this isn’t true. Here’s what’s been happening:

A thief, presumably female, has been doing the rounds of gyms in London. Whether she has identified her targets in advance or is assessing their wealth by what she finds in their lockers isn’t known, but what is known is that she steals their mobile phone and cards from their locker and then has a field day, or at least a field-hour-or-two emptying their accounts and spending their money. 

This is the point at which you might start asking questions around security and password protection. Surely our thief would need to know access codes? And aren’t our phones locked and facial recognition a safeguard? Apparently not, and that’s the clever bit. What this thief has been doing is to download the relevant bank app for the card they’ve stolen on their own phone. Then they register the stolen card. Because the app recognises this as the first time that the card has been used on the new device it requests a security code, which the bank sends to the owners registered phone which, you remember, our thief also has. Here’s the clever bit in action – the security code can flash up on the locked screen of the stolen phone. All our thief has to do now is tap that code into the app on their own phone and they have control. The world, or at least their victim’s finances, is their oyster for as long as it takes for them to be rumbled and the victim’s bank advised.

It's a cracker, isn’t it? And of course, it’s not a scheme that's going to be limited to gyms or indeed ladies. A simple solution would be to not keep your phone and wallet together when you’re out of the house, but there’s something else you can do, and that is to stop a thief from being able to read the security code sent to the locked phone. Here’s how:

If you have an iPhone:

• Go to Settings
• Scroll to Messages
• Scroll to Notifications
• Scroll to Show Previews where there are three choices: Always / When Unlocked / Never
• Select either When Unlocked or Never. Your messages will no longer flash up when your phone is locked

Or for Android:

• Go to Settings
• Select Lock Screen
• Select Notifications
• Select Don't Show Notifications. Your messages will no longer flash up when your phone is locked

Simples!

You have been warned!