Data breaches are abused on voice phishing

Worries have become a reality that personal information leaked from banks and credit card companies can be abused in second crimes. It was confirmed that the personal financial information leaked from commercial banks last year was used in voice phishing.

Gankgbuk Police in Seoul said Wednesday that it jailed four people who impersonated a bank to snatch loans, and booked five telemarketers without detention. They set up a telemarketing office in two officetels in Goyang City, Gyeonggi Province for a half a month from mid-March and intercepted 37 million won (365,630 U.S. dollars) from 10 people.

They used 1,912 of more than 7,000 personal information leaked from Citibank, to approach borrowers of money with more than 10 percent interest rate. They impersonated employees of banks of credit cooperatives and told borrowers they will allow them to transfer to low interest rate loans. They urged people to accumulate high rate lending. They urged borrowers to lend money through private lenders and then made them put in the money to their borrowed-name bank accounts.

They also collected 326 additional personal data such as cash card numbers and passwords, and sold them online for 10,000 won (9.6 dollars) each. The information they collected before voice phishing include names, contact info, loan amount, lending rates, outstanding loans, date of lending and expiry, name of company and social security number. The victims are known to have trusted them since they called and told them when and how much they had lent and thus made them believe as if bank employees were introducing low rate service.

In April last year, a former Citibank employee printed out 34,000 personal information of borrowers in 1,100 papers and sent them to loan agents. The person was exposed in December. A source at Citibank said, "We sent notice to customers on 1,912 cases through text messages and ground mail, and posted the notice on our homepage," adding, "We will identify the fact relations of secondary damages and will make compensation based on legal examination."

In January this year, 104 million cases of personal information were leaked from KB Kookmin, Lotte Card and NH Nonghyup Card, raising customer concerns.