BY KERRY TOMLINSON, AMPERE NEWS

August 19, 2021

Online banking can make managing your money easier. It makes stealing your money easier as well.

Ampere News found a series of fake bank sites designed to trick you into giving up the goods.

Here's how the investigation went down.

Watch here:

“Reliable” Banking

Welcome to the International Bank of Denmark, or IBD. It's home to "reliable banking," the site claims.

Let's see if that's true.

We started with the bank's picture on the home page of intlbankdenmark (dot) com, a modern, glass-covered building with what looks like the bank's name crudely edited on it.

When we checked out the the bank's listed address on Google Maps --- Holmens Kanal 2-12 in Copenhagen, Denmark --- we saw an entirely different building in its spot. That is an actual bank in Copenhagen. Not IBD, but a different name: Danske Bank.

The Danske Bank building is much older, from the 1700's, in fact, as we learned from Danish cybersecurity experts Søren Knudsen and Mikael Vingaard.

Both have been down to that street many times and say there is no modern building like the one claimed to be IBD in the area.

"Absolutely not," said Vingaard of En Garde Security. “It's in the old part of Denmark."

"Definitely not," said Knudsen. "No way. Because that's a new building and it even doesn't look like that at all. It's quite different."

We found that the image of IBD building is actually a building for Hyundai, based in South Korea.

Tricky Pictures

Knudsen and Vingaard found more strikes against the International Bank of Denmark.

It's not registered to do business in Denmark, nor is it registered as a bank in the country, as required. In addition, Knudsen says the ATMs shown on the IBD site don't look like real Danish ATMs.

We sourced IBD's ATM picture to a different bank in Germany. It's the same picture, down to the green sticker on the middle machine. The signs are doctored to fit the ruse.

And then, the final blow: IBD's CEO is listed as Christian Sewing. But Sewing is actually the CEO of Deutsche Bank in Germany. In fact, the entire IBD board appears to be made of people who are currently or formerly associated with Deutsche Bank, not IBD at all.

Ampere News notified Deutsche Bank of the issue.

"Denmark is definitely not Germany and German is definitely not Denmark," said Vingaard, "some of the signs that said, 'Okay, something is something is quite literally rotten in Denmark.'"

Or more likely, rotten in the International Bank of Denmark.

WHERE ARE THE BAD GUYS?

We checked with the site registrar, Namecheap. The owners' registration info is private, listed at an Iceland address with the registration company, Withheld for Privacy.

Ampere News notified Namecheap of the issue.

The message we sent to the email address on the International Bank of Denmark's site went unanswered.

But that’s not the end of the story.

Replica Site

We tracked down almost an exact replica of the IBD bank site. It's called Al Etihad Credit Bank, supposedly located in the United Kingdom, located at aecbuk (dot) com.

The building image is the same, with with the new bank's name crudely edited on top.

Other site images, like the German ATMs, are also the same.

Same text, same features, and the same problems, like no registration to do business in the U.K., nor to act as a bank.

And then there's this.

The board of directors for Al Etihad --- or Unity --- Credit Bank is different from IBD's, but with its own fakery.

Al Etihad's CEO is claimed to be Sir Maurice Flanagan. But the real Sir Flanagan died six years ago. He was actually the founder of Emirates Airlines --- no connection to Al Etihad Credit Bank.

It looks like the tricksters simply took the real board from a real organization called the Emirates Literature Foundation in Dubai and copied it onto their own site.

Ampere News notified the Emirates Literature Foundation of the copycat board.

String of Sites

The scammers don't limit their work to just one Al Etihad Credit Bank site. They've tried this on at least six sites with similar addresses and similar schemes.

The bank name appears in several scam letters, and the sites show up as problematic on a virus scanning service called VirusTotal.

VirusTotal lists some of the analyses of the AL Etihad Credit Bank sites, including malware and phishing.

The International Bank of Denmark site is not yet as active as the Al Etihad Credit Bank sites, but it already shows up with phishing warnings on Virus Total.

Vingaard says his checks show IBD does not appear to be serving up malware to people right now, but that could change at a moment's notice.

Reliable banking? No.

Trust

Would Vingaard or Knudsen put their money into the International Bank of Denmark?

"No," said Vingaard. "I would most certainly not."

"Definitely not," said Knudsen. "That will probably just be a hole to put your money in. And they will never see them, ever. That will be my gut feeling." He adds that he can't definitively say whether the company is a fraud, but the site smells fishy.

"Take your money and run, quite literally," said Vingaard. "Don't do anything like that."

What Can You Do?

Be warned that scammers are churning out many of these fake bank sites.

You don't need to know people across the seas to investigate for yourself. For example, you can:

• Check the business registration.

• Check to see if it's registered as a bank.

• If it's a copycat site that looks like a real bank, track down the real bank's number and call them to make sure the web address is correct.

  
  
  

Don't trust a slick looking site without checking it out first. It may not be real.

After we reported the International Bank of Denmark site to multiple parties, the site is now shut down. No word yet on the Al Etihad Credit Bank sites, but we'll update this post if or when we learn more.

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