Telecommunications Minister Petra De Sutter has reached an agreement with telecom operators to step up the fight against “smishing”, or SMS fraud.
A budget of two million euros from the European recovery plan has been made available, the minister announced on Sunday.
The end-of-year festivities sees an increased activity of fraudulent “smishing” according to figures from IMEC research centre.
With this agreement, the minister wants to enable operators to develop software to combat fraudulent SMS. The new software should be operational within a year.
“Last year, the FLUBOT virus caused thousands of victims. Users mechanically clicked on a link sent to them via SMS, which allowed an application to intercept their access codes to mobile banking services,” De Sutter said.
The agreement will initially be signed by Telenet and Proximus.
