Bank Courier Card Collection Scam

A caller claims to be your bank's fraud team, and it ends with your bank card leaving your house in a stranger's hand. FraudSMART, the fraud-awareness initiative run by Banking & Payments Federation Ireland, defines it as follows: "A courier card scam is where fraudsters pretend to be your bank and arrange for your bank card to be collected from your home under guise of 'security reasons'." No one Irish bank is being impersonated here. Whoever calls says they are from whichever bank you already use, so the same script runs against customers of every bank in the country. It begins with a text about suspicious activity, moves to a call that sounds professional and urgent, and finishes with a courier or a taxi at your door to take the card away. Your PIN is asked for along the way, and you may be told to delete your banking app. FraudSMART states plainly that "Your bank will never send a courier or taxi to collect your bank card." The AIB Email Scam, under this same heading, is bank impersonation as well, but it is worked by email and ends with your log-in and card details typed into a fake website. This one ends with the card itself out of your hands and your PIN along with it. Despite the word courier, this has nothing to do with a parcel. No delivery is involved, and it is not the An Post SMS Scam or the Parcel Held at Customs Scam, which are about fake delivery fees.

• •Customers of any Irish bank — the caller claims to be from whichever bank you actually use
• •Anyone who is at home during the day and would answer the door to a courier
• •Anyone who has just had a text or call about suspicious activity on their account
• •People who deal with their bank in a branch or by phone rather than through an app, and are used to handing things to staff
• •People living alone, with nobody in the house to say the request sounds wrong

• •The call arrives after a text, so it reads as the bank following up on something you already knew about
• •The caller reads out transactions you do not recognise. They are convincing, and they are false
• •Handing a card to a person at your door feels safer and more ordinary than typing details into a website
• •Collecting a compromised card "for security reasons" sounds like a procedure, and most people have never been told their bank does not do it
• •Deleting the banking app is presented as part of the security process. It also removes the one screen where you would see the money going
• •Fear of losing your money makes the urgency feel appropriate rather than suspicious
• •A courier or taxi arriving exactly when promised is treated as proof the call was genuine