Spanish police warn of sophisticated SMS banking scams

Spanish law enforcement agencies, including the Mossos d'Esquadra and the Policía Nacional, have issued alerts regarding a sophisticated surge in SMS-based banking fraud, known as smishing.

In these attacks, criminals send text messages that mimic legitimate bank communications, often appearing within the same message thread as authentic notifications. The messages typically claim there has been an unauthorized charge or an urgent need to verify an account, creating a sense of panic. Victims are prompted to call a provided number or click a link, where they encounter scammers posing as professional bank employees.

A critical component of the fraud involves the request for verification codes. Authorities emphasize that these codes do not cancel fraudulent transactions as the scammers claim; instead, they are used to authorize the illegal operations. The sophistication of these attacks has increased, with criminals using short numbers that imitate official ones and domains that closely resemble those of legitimate financial institutions, making them difficult to distinguish from real messages.