How to verify Android Text messages?

ChilliBob

Guys, 

Sadly my Dad has been the victim of a scam on his Barclays bank account. I've done a MBam scan of the device and it's fine, I was just looking into the text messages. There's three seemingly from Barclays:

Barclays
BARCLAYS
Barclaycard

Scanning through all the messages, all appear genuine, and all have timestamps earlier than the date this all kicked off.

But, how does it work that an sms has Barclays, and doesn't have a number? Is there some kind of verification that only Barclays can use that name (seems unlikely). I can see phone number checkers on Barclays website, but can't see how to see an android sms's phone number!

Any help much appreciated! 

Sandtree

There is no verification process basically... when a text is sent the "sender" is set as a number or name etc, if you have the number in the address book then the number may be displayed as the contacts name instead. 

When you have a mobile phone your carrier controls and sets this as the number of your phone but most business texts are sent by computers not phone and so its up to them to decide what it shows up as... if you look online you will find plenty of services that allow you to put whatever you want as the sender

ChilliBob

I suspected that was the case. So bottom line no possible way to verify the integrity of an sms then? Unlike say an email where you can view the headers, inspect the hyperlinks etc

ChilliBob

There must be something, perhaps another app can interrogate the messages and find IP addresses and these can be searched to see if Barclays owns them or something. Probably clutching at straws but it seems a bit irritating! 

SiliconChip

The simple answer is that you should assume that any text claiming to come from a bank may be a scam and to call the bank yourself at a number you can be sure is theirs (i.e. from your card, statement or their website) to get them to confirm (or not) that the message is genuine.

Neil_Jones

ChilliBob said:

There must be something, perhaps another app can interrogate the messages and find IP addresses and these can be searched to see if Barclays owns them or something. Probably clutching at straws but it seems a bit irritating! 

Doesn't work like that.  IP addresses only apply to internet protocols (which is what IP stands in in "IP Address").  Text messages are built on a much older standard.  SMS is a stateless communication protocol in which every SMS message is considered entirely independent of other messages.

The only "logs" would be at the provider level, so assuming these messages of which you speak were scams, it may be that a log will be somewhere of which network they were on when they were sent (assuming they were sent from a phone, since its possible to send texts vi a web interface)..  But that's not going to help you.

The easiest thing to do is phone up Barclays and speak to the fraud department.

ChilliBob

Yeah for sure, that's what we have done. My Dad thinks they even said were going to send over a 4 digit code from Barclays etc and thinks they did.

Usually when I receive them I'm expecting them - like for mfa or similar, but some do seem iffy.

Thanks for confirming what I sort of suspected