SEB: Telephone scammers try to psychologically paralyze their victims

Phone scammers try to make their victims act quickly and aim to psychologically paralyze them, SEB's head of fraud prevention Kätlin Kukk said. Calls should be treated with extreme suspicion and are becoming harder to detect.
More than €7 million was stolen from Estonian residents last year by phone scammers, the Police and Boarder Guard Board said earlier this month. Scams are also on the increase.
"Unfortunately, financial fraud has become part of our daily lives. Not a single day goes by without at least one victim," Kukk told "Vikerhommik."
"In 2024, cash made up 33 percent of the total amount lost to phone scams, meaning that people either hand over cash themselves or give their bank cards along with PIN codes to fraudsters who knock on their doors, claiming to be bank employees coming to collect the card. This shows that those collecting the money are operating locally," she explained.
The expert said job advertisements for these scams can even appear on legitimate job portals.
"People are very quick to respond to job ads that promise money for little to no work. All of these ads are in Russian, and the applicants are mostly men," Kukk noted, adding that in Latvia, perfectly fluent Latvian-language scam calls have been spreading since late 2022.
"The police have said that fraudsters are now also recruiting Estonian speakers," she clarified.
People often still click on links sent via emails and text messages.
The criminals' strategy is to psychologically overwhelm the victim with an urgent problem.
"They call claiming to be from the bank, saying that someone has hacked into your account and that some of your savings are already gone, so the problem needs to be resolved immediately. These are the kinds of high-pressure situations to watch out for," Kukk stressed.
"Another red flag is when they start asking for bank card numbers, passwords, login credentials — anything that grants access to an account. Third, if they ask you to sign something. These are critical moments. If someone asks for specific information over the phone that should only be known to you, that is a major warning sign. If your bank or the police actually call you, they already know who they are calling. A bank can see your card number and username; they do not need to ask for them. PIN codes should be known only to you," the security expert warned.
The devastating cases romance scams that leave victims emotionally traumatized.
"When someone finally realizes that they have lost everything, they often keep it to themselves. But talking about these cases should not be a source of shame — it is an unfortunate reality we must face today," Kukk said, and encouraged victims to speak out.
"We need to be extremely skeptical of everything that reaches us through the internet, phone calls, or emails — anything we cannot fully verify physically — because the situation is not improving. Scams are only becoming more sophisticated and even harder to detect," she added.
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Editor: Annika Remmel, Helen Wright
Source: Vikerhommik, interview by Kirke Ert and Taavi Libe