A Palestinian resident of the West Bank was arrested early on Sunday by the police and the IDF on suspicion of behind an Internet phishing scam targeting Bank Leumi customers.
Customers wait outside a branch of Bank Leumi.
Photo: Ariel Jerozolimski [file]
The suspect, 22, is a resident of Lower Beit Horon (Beit Ghur e-Tahta), between Modi'in and Ramallah. He was taken into custody by detectives from Judea and Samaria Police District's Binyamin station and Tel Aviv police investigators, as soldiers secured the arrest.
An investigation was opened two weeks ago by the Tel Aviv police's computer crimes division after Bank Leumi filed a complaint.
Detectives focused on a number of fraudulent e-mails sent to Bank Leumi customers in which the suspect posed as the bank, and asked them for their username and passwords, police said.
"In this way, the suspected 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 Web site, and built a Web site that claimed it was the Bank of Israel Web site," police added.
Bank Leumi has been the target of previous phishing scam attempts. In 2008, the bank smashed an Internet fraud-ring from Brazil that targeted its customers.
"Don't open e-mails from people you don't know. We never send e-mails to our customers," Bank Leumi spokesman Aviram Cohen said following the exposure of that fraud attempt.
