You don’t usually buy much but today you bought a very expensive TV and then got a car wash in a part of town you haven’t been to for two years.
We aren’t calling you about the TV. We’re calling about the $8 car wash.
(Actual incident)
I hung up and instead called the actual number on the back of the card. The whole thing was real, the bank had actually contacted me by text and sent me a follow up phone number.
Truly I don't understand what they're thinking sometimes.
Disclaimer: my bank does this
And they definitely have the 2FA-through-app capability because it's used for auth when I sign into online banking on a computer— the app has to grant permission for the new device. But hilariously they don't seem to have it wired up yet for phone interactions.
Of course the more automation you put around this, the easier it becomes to MITM it, like a scammer simultaneously calls both you and the bank and passes the codes back and forth, pretending to you that the call is about a credit card offer, while using the call with the bank to drain your account. That's a lot harder to pull off with a human in the loop as the real bank person will get suspicious at the delayed responses, even barring some amount of stalling ("oh hang on I left my phone downstairs, let me find it oh god it's updating again, let me just get you that code, give me a sec here"). But it becomes trivial if the authentication is moved to IVR and by the time the human operator is on the line the call is already considered safe.
FFS guys, at the bare minimum you should have white-labeled that behind a domain like id.irs.gov! Not just to avoid mis-educating users into terrible security habits, but also to avoid giving some Montenegro DNS folks the ability to intercept or man-in-the-middle all the information.
They did stop putting hyperlinks in email communications though. It’s a start.
Nobody even cared, but a payment I made for 2 euros wasn't accepted becuase reasons, and every online purchase needed some authorization.
When I called them, they said they'll look into the purchases. Well, they cancelled the purchases quite fast, but the surrealism of it all...
There's always some third party thing I'm trying to figure out why it's telling me 'no' and not providing useful error messages and it's because they can't tell me without also telling the mischief-makers.
On the flip side, it's somewhat difficult to buy an expensive TV without showing up on camera at some point. As methods for monetizing stolen cards go, it's pretty uncommon.
Seriously?!?
Everybody knows that's not a random number.
Which is to say, if someone used a random number generator and received 12345 and then huffed online about how it isn't generating 'real' random numbers in a security thread, you would be right to second guess anything they had to say if they start with an immediately false premise.