18th January 2024
Beware of Phishing Attacks via SMS
There is currently an increase in phishing attacks via text messages claiming that your "registration" for George or Erste Bank and Sparkassen is about to expire (similar scams were already seen in August 2023). As always with phishing, fake login pages are used to obtain access credentials and authorisations.
In this scam, the fraudsters attempt to digitise your credit card or debit card for use on a new device after logging into your internet banking, which requires an additional authorisation from you. Please always be cautious with supposedly “urgent” requests of this kind and do not authorise anything that you have not started yourself.
How can you protect yourself from this scam?
Never enter confidential financial data on unknown websites. If you look closely, you can see from the URLs in the example that these are fake sites.
You can recognise our internet banking George by the domain "[...].sparkasse.at/[...] in the URL. We explain here in detail how to recognise fraudulent links.
Always check precisely what you authorise: The decisive factor is not what someone claims on the phone or in the chat, but the information shown on your authorisation screen.
If in doubt, cancel the process and contact our helpdesk on 050 100 50200.