Ulster bank text alert

pjordan

My wife got a 2 alert texts from Ulster Bank last night from a UK number 07860020323 alerting her to possible unauthorised listed transactions on her account and asking her to respond Y or N to text to confirm if the transactions were genuine.

Even though she had recieved texts from UB before I was still somewhat suspicious considering the hour of the night (after 11pm) and the relatively obscure nature of the texts.

In any case we were concerned enough to call their customer service number (Which was closed since 10pm) and to Google the number and search for info on the UB website.

Finally we got through to them this morning and it transpires that it WAS a genuine text alert and that real fraudelent attempts had been made against the account by cloned or stolen debit card details.

My bugbear however is that this number isn't listed anywhere on the Ulster Bank website as one from which you can expect to receive genuine text alerts and when you Google the number you get a list of both genuine and questionable comments relating to its use by Nat West in the UK (Who I appreciate are UB's parent bank?)

My initial reaction last night was to write it off as a hoax or at least suspicious and definitely not to respond to the text even with a simple Y or N response. I think UB need to make it much clearer on their website that such texts can be quite genuine.

Graham

pjordan wrote: »

My bugbear however is that this number isn't listed anywhere on the Ulster Bank website as one from which you can expect to receive genuine text alerts

That's probably quite sensible, it would take fraudsters about 25seconds to start spoofing text messages from any published number.

pjordan

Graham wrote: »

That's probably quite sensible, it would take fraudsters about 25seconds to start spoofing text messages from any published number.

Fair point which I hadn't considered but nonetheless Ulster Bank website isn't very clear on the nature of text alerts they tend to send out and how one should respond to them.

Graham

pjordan wrote: »

Fair point which I hadn't considered but nonetheless Ulster Bank website isn't very clear on the nature of text alerts they tend to send out and how one should respond to them.

It's a tough balancing act, getting enough information out to the customers -v- giving fraudsters another plausible point of entry.

I hadn't heard of any banks using text messages as a means of confirming suspicious transactions. From a customer perspective it's a much better approach than simply blocking your card (which happened to my Mrs recently).