Monday, October 31, 2011

Automated Teller Phone Phishing

Early this morning I was awakened by my ringing cell phone.  When I answered it, I was greeted by an automated teller stating that my Wells Fargo debit card had been disabled.  The cause was due to potentially fraud activity.  This of course was highly worrisome as I can now not use my non-existent Wells Fargo debit card.  Subsequently I hung up on the automated teller while swearing at it and throwing miscellaneous items around the bedroom.

This is all well and good until I received another call a bit over 10 hours later stating the same thing.  This time though, I decided to play along.  To play along, I had to enter a 1 to be immediately transferred to debit card security services.  Upon selecting one, the same automated teller stated that it would require four pieces of information from me to re-activate my card.  The first was the last four of my social, duly entered "6666".  The next was the full 16 digits of my card.. I could not get past this point as the automated teller was checking for at least basic validity of the card.  Note that I am prepared now though and have generated some bogus numbers that I will enter.  I'll also record and post said recording.

The automated teller clearly sounds like a generic asterisk type.  That said, I'm gonna actually try to post some more useful security and BSD stuff!