There are also scammers on online housing markets who misuse sent salary certificates.
Watchlist Internet reports that consumers who are looking for rental apartments sometimes come across fake apartment advertisements. If you are interested in a property, as usual, you send your payslips from the last few months to the alleged landlords. Criminals use the data to inform the apartment seekers' employers about an account change and to divert salaries!
Criminals pose as employees
People who are looking for a new rental apartment like to use a variety of online platforms, such as Willhaben, Immobilienscout24, or Immowelt. While the majority of advertisements on such sites are trustworthy, fraudulent offers also occur from time to time. “Watchlist Internet” has reports on a new scam in which criminals create apartment advertisements and ask interested parties to send in their pay slips. While there is no rental agreement, the data received about the employers and apartment seekers is further processed maliciously. The criminals pose as the employees and inform their employing companies about a change in the account for upcoming salary payments.
Tips for consumers
If you are looking for an apartment to rent, it will be difficult to get an apartment without sending pay slips to the landlord in advance. However, you can keep the following points in mind to minimize the risk of fraud and make it more difficult for criminals to do their job:
- Only provide your counterpart with the absolutely necessary data. For example, you can black out all information on your payslip that is irrelevant to your apartment search.
- Black out company-internal identification features such as employee numbers or key figures.
- Black out your account information such as IBAN and BIC.
- Redact the names of the people or departments responsible for payroll.
- Be skeptical of unrealistically cheap advertisements. This may just be intended to collect data and find new victims.
Tips for companies
For companies that change payroll accounts based on a fraudulent request without consulting their employees, such cases could result in significant financial loss. It is therefore important that you as an employer set up appropriate security measures that exclude criminals from internal communication:
- Consult your employees about such changes and carry out a double check. Such an attempted fraud would be exposed immediately.
- Confirm any change in account information to your employees.
- Set up an intranet so that internal communication is strictly separated from external communication. If changes to salary accounts and similar concerns are only handled this way, a request from outside is immediately recognizable as dubious.
Notes:
1) This content reflects the current state of affairs at the time of publication. The reproduction of individual images, screenshots, embeds or video sequences serves to discuss the topic. 2) Individual contributions were created through the use of machine assistance and were carefully checked by the Mimikama editorial team before publication. ( Reason )