New phone scam spreads in Hungary: here are the numbers you should be aware of

Countless horror stories exist where mostly elderly, trusting people have been scammed out of huge sums of money online or by phone. A common thread in all these cases is that the fraudsters ask for bank account details under some pretext, which then allows them free rein to empty the victims’ accounts without shame. Now, a new phone scam is spreading—watch out for these calls.

A reader shared the latest scam method and the phone numbers used by the criminals with bama.hu, a news portal in Baranya County, after they failed to deceive her but wanted to warn others not to fall into the scammers’ trap. What’s unusual here is that the scammers not only dangled a tempting offer but also resorted to threats: they menaced their target after first offering a prize.

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Unknown number, big prize

The story began when an unknown number called the unsuspecting bama.hu reader, telling her she had won 500,000 forints to spend at Lidl, Aldi, or Tesco. Obviously suspicious, the call continued. The woman on the line then asked for the bank’s name (including its address) and the preferred date for the transfer.

That’s when the victim hung up, realising it was a scam. But the ordeal didn’t end there. They called back, asking why she had ended the call.

“I said thank you, but I’m not interested. After that, they kept calling from different numbers, and then even pretended to be from the bank—I told them to take a hike, that they had the wrong person and wouldn’t fool me,” the victim told bama.hu.

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Here are the guilty “phone numbers”

But the scammers didn’t stop. Calls kept flooding the victim’s phone. Since she was expecting an important call from a client, she occasionally answered. They insulted her with obscene language, claimed to know which company she worked for, knew her home address, and threatened to find her and take action. They harassed her for over an hour despite her repeatedly blocking their numbers, as the scammers could mobilise far more numbers than she could block.