Colombia: bank impersonation scams rise

Banco de Bogotá warned about a rise in fraudulent schemes that combine text messages, phone calls and malicious links to impersonate well-known institutions and steal customer data. The coverage also describes websites that copy official pages to capture login credentials and financial information.

What tactics are they using?

The campaigns mix phishing, smishing and vishing to make notices, calls or websites look legitimate when they are actually designed to steal information. According to coverage from El País Cali, criminals use text messages, phone calls and fraudulent links to send users to sites that mimic official pages.

At the same time, a report from La Kalle, citing figures released by the Police Cyber Center, said Colombia recorded more than 64,000 complaints tied to digital scams during 2025. Reported tactics include impersonation of financial institutions, fraudulent messages and WhatsApp account theft.

What other fraud schemes were reported in Colombia?

During 2026, Colombian authorities warned about text messages impersonating Bre-B and directing users to fraudulent links to confirm supposed transfers, with the goal of obtaining sensitive information. That tactic adds to schemes that mimic banks and other entities to capture credentials and financial data.

Another report, based on data from the Superintendency of Industry and Commerce, said the agency had received 40,316 complaints for impersonation from 2020 through June 2026. The same report attributed more than 765,000 fraud claims to Colombian banks in 2025, for an amount above 967 billion pesos, according to an Asobancaria report published in September 2026.

What do the reports say about how the fraud is evolving?

DPL News said reported cybercrime in Colombia rose 36% in the first five months of 2026 and that about four in 10 citizens were victims of fraud in the previous 12 months, although those figures do not identify the primary statistical source. The same publication said ColCERT confirmed that cybercriminals are using artificial intelligence to make campaigns more precise and harder to detect, and it stated that fraud accounted for nearly 80% of the incidents handled by the team over the previous two years.

The mix of SMS, calls, fake links and cloned websites has emerged as the core of the most repeated campaigns in the country, with bank impersonation, financial services and even Bre-B among the most visible tactics in the reports reviewed.