A Palestinian resident of the West Bank was arrested early on Sunday by the Israel Police and the IDF on suspicion of being behind an internet phishing scam targeting Bank Leumi customers.
The suspect, 22, is a resident of Bet Ur Athata. He was taken into custody by detectives from Judea and Samaria's Binyamin station and Tel Aviv police investigators, as IDF soldiers secured the arrest.
An investigation was launched two weeks ago by the computer crimes division of Tel Aviv police after Bank Leumi filed a police complaint over the alleged hacker's activities.
Detectives focused on a number of fraudulent emails sent to Bank Leumi customers in which the alleged hacker posed as the bank, and asked his
intended victims to give away their username and passwords.
"In this way, the suspect amassed dozens of internet account details of bank customers, and many dozens of credit card numbers," Tel Aviv
police said in a statement.
"The suspect then hacked into the accounts in order to check their balance and make various uses of the credit card details. We also know that the suspect carried out a further attack on a Bank of Israel website, and built a website which claimed it was the Bank of Israel website," police added.
Bank Leumi has been the target of previous phishing scam attempts. In 2008, the bank smashed an internet fraud-ring that targeted its customers from Brazil.
"Don't open emails from people you don't know. We never send emails to our customers," Bank Leumi Spokesman, Aviram Cohen, said following the
exposure of that fraud attempt.
