Last Thursday afternoon, an account manager from my bank called me. He was asked by telephone and e-mail on my behalf to make an urgent transfer of almost €8000 from my current account to a Dutch bank account. Supposedly for an urgently needed purchase of material.
Verification questions about my identity were no problem for the caller. I quote the account manager, "He knew everything." But the account manager was not yet convinced. He called me at home, first landline (I wasn't at home), then cell phone. Bingo! The fraud attempt was debunked.
The e-mail address that the criminal had set up in my honor was carefully chosen: [email protected]
All right, all right. Yandex is the Russian Google, so there is also Yandex Mail. But please don't jump to conclusions. Anyone can set up an address there for free. And you don't even have to be able to read Cyrillic and understand Russian. A tiny bit of English is enough.
But there is a temporal coincidence, that caught my attention. For a few weeks now I have been registered at Coin Exchange, for learning and further education, because I want to stay mentally fit. Everyone knows, at least everyone who wants to continue their education: they do a very comprehensive identity check. I really had to drop my pants.
By the way, I strongly advise against imagining this process now. This is what is called an "idiom", i. e. a sensefulness that is not directly revealed by the individual words. Damn, it works again, the teacher becomes visible again, I spread my knowledge without being asked again ... 😉
Basically, I handle my personal data very sparingly. So I only use my wife's credit card 😌 , I keep silent about my account data and - just another example - I don't mention my birthday date, e. g. in online shops. What if the birthday field is not optional? Well, I get nice birthday greetings with coupons all year round.
Back to identity check. It went against the grain, but otherwise no further training was possible. So we don't misunderstand each other: I consider these coin exchanges to be absolutely reliable - but also vulnerable.
And that's where Kim Jong-un comes in,"the little rocket man" (Trump).
Workshop at which Kim Jong-un is currently demonstrating how to set up an e-mail account on yandex. com.
I read in this week's Spiegel magazine that experts estimate that he commands up to 7000 hackers who, with skill and perseverance, also take care of coin exchanges. Plus my introduceyourself post! Therein he could read that I now have plenty of time to further my education. On Google servers he finds my search queries about coins and coin exchanges - so, for me it sounds very plausible that it was actually Kim Jong-un who called my account manager.
Remarks:
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