A group of 35 people who last summer were victims of phishing, met yesterday in Santiago de Compostela with representatives of ‘Pérez-Lema Avogados e Consultores’ with the aim of joining together to file a class action lawsuit.
Some of these people a few months ago they lost even more than 150,000 euros for falling into the trap of phishing, which reached his emails on behalf of Abanca, his bank. Other affected people claim to have lost all of their savings.
Those affected want to “group under a single legal address.” The law firm says that this way “no one has to be deprived of filing a legal claim for this problem due to lack of funds.” It was agreed to group the claims, which will go through civil channels, according to typologies in order to reduce procedural costs and of all kinds ”, is what they have explained from the office.
THEFT OF DATA AND UNSOLICITED PACKAGES WHAT IS BRUSHING?
Phishing on behalf of Abanca
Between August and the beginning of September of this year, a phishing scam was alerted on behalf of Abanca. It was a case of smishing (phishing via SMS) that sought to obtain the personal information of the clients of this bank. As Maldito Bulo warned, the link that includes an SMS, takes you to a web page that is not available. The URL to which the initial message led began with “https: //abanca.digital …” and that is not the official URL of Abanca (https://www.abanca.com/es/), something like that, as users, you must always pay attention to this type of case and it should serve as the first warning sign.
In the summer of 2020, the National Cybersecurity Institute or INCIBE warned of another scam phishing on behalf of Abanca (like the one in the picture above). In the identified campaign, the email had as subject: «New message». The body of the message indicated to the user that an account update had been carried out.
At the moment there is no more information about how the class action lawsuit will proceed nor of how it seeks to hold the bank responsible for this neglect on the part of the victims.
Abanca was sentenced to return the money to a phishing victim in the past
This lawsuit in which the clients of the banking entity seek to hold the company responsible, takes place a few weeks after the Hearing of Pontevedra condemned Abanca to return the scammed money to a client who was a victim of ‘phishing’. That was the first sentence registered in Galicia in which the entity impersonated for phishing was sentenced to reimburse all the money to the victim.
The court in Vigo initially ruled in favor of the bank since the client had had a “careless attitude” and that led Abanca to authorize the transfer. Yes, the client was limited to not being able to transfer more than 10,000 euros in a transaction and here the money transferred was almost double.
The initial sentence was appealed and the Hearing of Pontevedra ended up giving the reason to the victim. According to them, the client did not act negligently, while they condemn the behavior of the bank, both in that aforementioned transaction, and in their actions after learning about the scam.
Regarding phishing, the judges concluded that “the message received by the ‘phishing’ victim had “certain peculiarities” that they should have alerted her to the scam, but that does not make her to blame for what happened.