Preventing Phishing... Woori Bank Launches Overseas Remittance Recipient Account Verification Service

Woori Bank announced on the 25th that it will implement the ‘Overseas Remittance Recipient Account Pre-Verification Service’ to prevent customer damages caused by fraudulent overseas remittances such as romance phishing and email hacking, as well as mistaken overseas remittances.

The Overseas Remittance Recipient Account Pre-Verification Service is available to all Woori Bank customers using overseas remittance services. By visiting a branch and submitting the recipient’s account number, recipient name, and recipient bank’s BIC CODE, customers can pre-verify the details of the recipient account.

Based on the information submitted by customers, Woori Bank will compare it with past overseas remittance data to check the status of normal processing (whether the remittance was canceled or corrected), the consistency between the submitted information and past data, and the validity of the BIC CODE. This information will be provided as a reference for overseas remittances.

Furthermore, if the verified recipient account has been involved in fraudulent overseas remittances such as email hacking in the past, Woori Bank will inform the customer of this fact and that the account requires additional verification to protect financial consumers, thereby preventing secondary fraud damages.

A Woori Bank official stated, “The Recipient Account Pre-Verification Service was developed to protect financial consumers based on Woori Bank’s vast overseas remittance data, which amounts to 3.8 million cases. We will continue to make efforts to expand this service to non-face-to-face channels such as internet banking to provide customers with convenient and safe service usage.”