You can do a lot to prevent IT criminals from misusing your internet bank or your payment information.

Fake emails and text messages

Many often receive fake emails and text messages purporting to be sent from eg the bank, Visa, Mastercard, Nets and PayPal. None of these – including Sydbank – will ever send unsolicited emails or text messages asking customers for personal information such as their civil registration number, PIN, password, card information or MitID information. Therefore please do not respond to such emails/text messages or click on any link.

Warning – fake invoices/payment instructions

An increasing number of our customers fall victim to email hacking. Hackers break into email correspondence and change the payment instructions in the original email. And quite often these changes are very professionally done.

Other customers have received a correct invoice which is subsequently followed by a fake email instructing payment into a different account. The hacker may for instance refer to a previous email that he has intercepted. Therefore he is able to control the correspondence – either from the same email account or from an email account that is difficult to distinguish from the real email account.

We strongly warn against invoices

– where payment instructions have been changed compared with previous invoices to the same recipient. If you are asked to change the recipient of a payment, take extra care if you have received the new payment instructions by email. Email correspondence with Asia is particularly exposed to hacking attacks but they may occur anywhere.

We recommend

– that you always make a check call to the counterparty when you receive emails containing changed payment instructions or suspicious-looking emails. Remember not to use any contact data in the potentially fake email.