Sharjah – Omaima Yasser – ANDROID users are facing a new threat that can redirect your phone calls to online fraudsters to steal money, as a terrifying new bug has been discovered that may make users of this technology think twice before making any calls.
The threat is currently targeting users across Korea, spreading a nasty Trojan called “Fakecalls” to intercept the line when people connect to services like their own bank.
Fakecalls works by being able to mimic the official apps of a number of popular banking providers. Once installed, users are tricked into taking advantage of the fraudulent program whenever they need to check their account balance, call customer service to make changes or pay bills.
Even worse, once Fakecalls is installed, it has the ability to hijack real phone calls made to the bank, and when the Trojan detects that you are calling a number associated with the provider, the bug will secretly disconnect and open its fake call instead. Users may never know that they are actually talking to a hacker, not an employee of the financial institution of their choice, and once connected, the scammers then try to steal the money by extracting personal data such as account numbers and passwords.
Security at Kaspersky, which tracks fake calls, says the problems don’t just stop there because this threat is able to take control of devices, where hackers can then locate their victims and even copy their list of contacts or files (including photos and videos).
Another scary feature of this attack is the ability to drop incoming calls and delete them from the registry. It is worth noting before downloading anything to your phone, as there is no indication that fake calls will not start spreading to other parts of the world.