Commonwealth Bank Issues Major Warning Over New Text Scam Claiming to be Security Alert

The Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) has issued a warning about a flood of text messages purporting to be "security alerts" asking people to secure their accounts.

Prior to the latest alert, recently released financial statistics showed that Australians suffered over $455 million in fraud losses in 2023, with the majority targeting people over 65 years old.

The latest scam text message claims to be from the CBA officials, asking people to click on a suspicious link to "secure" their account and claiming that their account has been registered for "a new CommBank app".

According to a CBA spokesman, the link was not a legitimate communication from the bank.

“The bank would never ask customers to log on or provide sensitive info via a link in an email or text,” the spokesman said.

“Customers should immediately delete any of those messages received.”

The CBA spokesperson urged customers to protect themselves by turning on notifications in their banking app or enabling security features.

Statistics from ScamWatch, run by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), reveal that in 2023, Australians lost $455,436,239 to scams.

Investment fraud caused more than $275 million in losses, the most of any category.

There were 99,736 phishing scams reported to banks and financial institutions, followed by 36,645 false billing scams and 19,565 online shopping scams.

In total, there were more than 280,000 fraud reports.

(Source: news.com.au)