VIDEO Police spokesperson, warning of a scam after his number was cloned. “There are other colleagues in a similar situation”

Chief Police Commissioner Bogdan Ghebaur, the spokesperson of the Romanian Police, warned that his phone number was cloned and used in a scam in which the perpetrators called citizens and claimed to want to help them avoid a credit fraudulently accessed in their name.

The Police spokesman said that his phone number, which is public, “was used fraudulently through a technique called 'spoofing'”, a method by which “criminals clone the phone number and pass themselves off as someone with credible and verifiable references”.

“If you received a call from my phone number claiming to be helping you avoid a loan taken out in your name, that person was not me. My number, being public, was used fraudulently through a technique called “spoofing”. Other colleagues in the country are in a similar situation”, said Bogdan Ghebaur, in a video message published on Sunday on the Facebook page of the Romanian Police.

“How did we find out? Several people did the most important thing to avoid a fraud in such situations. They called the phone number from which they were called,” he added.

The spokesperson of the Romanian Police advised the citizens not to transfer money, not to provide personal data and not to install any application giving directions to a stranger.

Expert in IT security, new fraud and the impact of AI

Silviu Stahie, IT security specialist at Bitdefender, spoke in an interview to HotNews about the most dangerous online scams of the moment and explained why we should be careful about giving personal information to chatbots.

He warned that cyber-attacks can no longer be recognized by grammatical mistakes, and could soon come in the form of the voices of close people.

“One effect of grammatically correct messages is that they are much more difficult for people to detect and then social engineering is easier to do. We start to see things that we didn't see before. For example, we also started getting those phone calls from people who claim to be from the police and tell you that you are involved in a case. That attacker is following a script that is well developed and is not written by someone, but probably they used an AI agent”, he declared the expert.