The low-tech and traditional way of doing this is by watching or filming over your shoulder at a cashpoint as you enter your PIN and then stealing/cloning your card later on. However, we increasingly see people use the same PIN on their phone as their bank card or their mobile banking app PIN. Fraudsters will again watch people enter their phone PIN over their shoulder and use that to guess their banking PIN.

We often see cases referred to as “safe account scams” where callers pretend to be from your bank and convince you that your account is compromised. Other similar scams include people pretending to be from other organisations such as Amazon or HMRC. The commonality is that they get remote access and, once you are logged into your bank, they steal the money by sending it from your account or they make transactions that trick you into approving.

We’ve seen cases where in advance, the caller has managed to get many personal details from the customer. They pretend to be from their bank and tell them to cancel their card and that a new one is on the way. They manage to do a clever trick where they tell you to set up Apple Pay temporarily while you wait for your new card and in doing so, convince you to give them some access codes for the Apple pay registration. In reality, they are setting up your account on their own phone alongside Apple Pay and will then go on a spending spree.