Leaked personal information is being used to make fraud calls look as if they come from the people victims trust most. A security researcher has demonstrated how a caller can pose as a relative by spoofing a family member's phone number.
One case involved a mobile phone that displayed the number of the owner's family home. The caller claimed to have committed a robbery and demanded money, according to FNN Prime Online. The technique is known as spoofing — disguising a call so the receiver sees someone else's number.
A call that appeared to come from city hall
A man in his 30s described a call he had just received. The display showed the number of Hitachinaka city hall in Ibaraki Prefecture, and the caller offered him a job. When he rang the city hall and asked for the person named on the display, that person was there but had made no call, the man said.
“The person hadn't called. But it came from that person's name and that phone number.”the man, in his 30s, call recipient
Impersonation calls are already a common fraud method in Japan. Callers posing as police have pressed people to cooperate with an investigation and then extracted money, and such cases are increasing.
Posing as a relative
At a security startup in Tokyo, white-hat hacker Masashi Naruse, who heads the business at Cloudbase, said the danger grows when a person's own number leaks together with information about their family. A caller can then claim to be a relative. Naruse called this a spoofing attack.
Naruse's colleague, a woman named Hamamoto, recreated the attack for the interview. The demonstration showed how a call can be made to appear to come from a family member's number.
Hang up and call back
The advice for anyone who receives a suspicious call is to hang up and call the number back. Checking whether your own information has leaked is also part of the response, and apps exist for that purpose.