Fraudsters find their potential victims among job seekers, looking for people who have placed advertisements on different Internet portals or social networks and address them by pretending to be representatives of large companies.
Fraudsters offer victims to apply for a vacancy, provided that someone opens an account at a bank. Then the perpetrators attempt to persuade the victim to disclose access data.
The head of Citadele's retail division, Jānis Mūrnieks, said that the bank had recently identified a number of cases where several amounts of money from different lenders are credited to the customer's account. It is important to point out that when fraudsters gain access to their victim's bank account, they will replace all contact information, so it is not possible to contact the customer.
Mūrnieks said that in order to find real contact data for the injured bank client, “detective work” often needs to be done.
The bank representative said that fraudsters mostly use phone calls for communication with the victim and are often not even in the territory of Latvia.
Meanwhile, State Police spokeswoman Gita Gžibovska said that police were asking residents to be careful, to check all information and in no case disclose data that can allow these individuals to gain access to a bank account. In cases where a person has encountered fraud or a suspicious scheme, they must first contact their bank and then contact the police.
