TikTok trend helping cybercriminals steal huge amounts of money. Currently, a TikTok rend is being hijacked by criminals and it is helping them steal lots of money.
TikTok Trend Helping Cybercriminals Steal Huge Amounts of Money
It now seems that cybercriminals have adopted a prank on TikTok, twisted it a bit, and are now using it to actively steal money from their selected victims. TikTokers for some time now have been involving themselves in a prank that would make them call any of their friends by making use of an automated answering machine, whose voice is generated using an online translator.
It doesn’t end there as they would then tell the selected friend that they are representing a major retail brand, asking them to confirm a bulky purchase which of course never happened to begin with. Once the user being pranked tries canceling the order, the answering machine then would confirm it instead of making it look like it was misheard. And then whatever the person being pranked would say, the machine would answer as if it is confirming the purchase.
On TikTok, the Prank Is Harmless
On the social media platform TikTok, the prank is harmless. But in other places, cybercriminals are actually using the same means to scam people of their money as per Kaspersky. The whole process is simple as they would send an email to a victim saying that they made a huge purchase which is at most times over $2000 that needs to be confirmed or canceled.
The email that will be sent will share a phone number that the victim can call in order to confirm their identity and cancel the order. People that are gullible enough to fall for it in calling customer support usually at the end of the day share sensitive payment data with the said attackers which will ultimately lead to their accounts being cleared.
Cybercriminals Intimidate Their Victims during Call
The attackers would try to intimidate the victims during the call by creating a false sense of urgency and then pressurizing them until they finally give in. in three months up until July, close to 350,000 emails were seen by Kaspersky. And it was recorded that in June alone, there had been 100,000 of those emails.
Cybercriminals have been making use of phone lines as attacking vectors frequently. The reason for this is due to the fact that email protection services are doing great at filtering emails that convey phishing links and attachments that carry ransomware or viruses.
