There are a number of scams being perpetrated by criminals in Brazil to illegally gain access to your bank accounts and you need to protect yourself, because the banks themselves are doing very little to prevent it. Online it is mostly a problem for users of Google Chrome.
First of all you need to keep in mind that no bank anywhere in Brazil will ever contact you by e-mail under any circumstances. Many people are taken in every year by e-mails supposedly from a bank stating that their are some irregularities with their account, the bank is restructuring their internet banking system, or other excuse, which directs them to a website which appears almost identical to the legitimate bank website. The e-mail instructs you do confirm all your registered information (recadastrar). If you fall for it you'll get wiped out before you even know it.
I don't know how many times I've gotten e-mails from banks and I don't even have an account. Never open an e-mail sent to you from any so-called bank under any circumstances. It may contain a Trojan Horse Virus that will skim all your account and password information the next time you enter your bank's website to conduct a transaction; or it will be one of these 'recadastrar' scams. Delete the e-mail without opening it or mark it as junk mail so the server can investigate.
BANKS DO NOT SEND E-MAIL MESSAGES TO THEIR CLIENTS - EVER!!!
Cheers,
William James Woodward - Brazil Animator, Expat-blog Team
Online Banking in Brazil - Protect Yourself from scams
Hear...hear...
Just as little as Microsoft / Yahoo or other huge company will just give you free goodies.
Or some lonely widow will share her billions with you if she could only get her money out of Kenya.
Or a lawyer found you to be the sole heir to a fortune....
Or you are the only hope for some poor soul to get the last money together for her flight to meet her husband, or finish the house, or save a poor child from sure death ....
Or....
Or....
Or....
Seems where money is involved, people either go googoogaga or just simply switch their brains of.
The criminals certainly never seem to stop thinking up more and more scams.
This seems to be a problem everywhere, not just in Brazil. Very common to hear about this in Canada.
How about the "dyed currency" scam??? That's one that makes me laugh because it's so ridiculous and plays on the victim's own greed and stupidity- making it hard to feel sorry for him/her.
"Gee Mr/Mrs/Ms. Stranger, I had to dye this million dollars in US banknotes black to sneak them out of the Democratic Republic of Central Mongoliauzbekistantinopolis without the corrupt government finding out. Now I can't afford to buy the special chemicals that remove the dye. Tell you what... if you give me the money to buy the chemicals, it's only ten thousand dollars, I will give you twenty-five thousand when we get the dye out of all of them. You can hold on to the banknotes until I come back with the dye removing chemicals."
As you can guess the scam artist never comes back again.
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