NORTH CAROLINA - Don’t respond to calls that claim to come from your bank and ask you to provide your debit card number or other account information, Attorney General Roy Cooper warned consumers Friday.
“If you get one of these phony phone calls, hang up,” Cooper said. “The calls come from scammers trying to steal your personal information and drain your account, not from your real bank.”
North Carolina consumers have reported getting fraudulent calls this week from scammers posing as the Bank of North Carolina and High Point Bank and Trust. A number of other banks with North Carolina customers have been impersonated by previous scams seeking personal information, including State Employees Credit Union, Gateway Bank, Bank of America and Wachovia (now Wells Fargo).
According to consumers’ reports, the latest versions of this scam often starts with an automated call saying that your debit card has been blocked and then ask you to press one to proceed. If you press one, you get live person who asks for your debit card number. Consumers who’ve received the calls report that they appear to come from numbers in Indiana, North Dakota, New Jersey and Canada. However, the criminals behind these scams are often located overseas and use technology to make their calls appear to come from numbers inside the U.S.
