For the forthcoming Lunar New Year holiday next month, the police plan to bolster their crackdown on voice phishing amid rising worries over damages from scamming.

A special task force team is being launched in a bid to deal with fraud phone calls and new tricks from scammers, a police official said.

The state-run financial regulator also warned that voice phishing scammers actively make fraud calls pretending to be parcel delivery services, since many Koreans send gifts for the occasion.

“Be suspicious of unsolicited calls even if the caller claims to represent a respected or well-known company,” an official from the Financial Supervisory Service said.

When a government organization has to contact individuals, it will never be through phone call but by sending a written statement, it added.

According to the FSS data, there were 5,795 victims of voice phishing and a total of 58.6 billion won ($53.5 million) stolen in the first half of 2014 alone -- an increase of 39.2 percent and 121.1 percent respectively on-year.

The Korea Internet and Safety Agency data showed that the amount of damages from scamming was 10.6 billion won from 1,480 cases in 2006.

Experts said the numbers soared in 2013 as scams became sophisticated with the advent of smartphones -- from smishing to pharming and voice phishing.

But the FSS data showed that just one out of 10 victims (11.4 percent) was able to recover the lost money in the first half of 2014. It is a 5.2 percent drop compared to 2013.

Over the years, vishing scam calls came from China and were untraceable. But the tricks that scammers use have grown bold off late.

When the new regulation surrounding year-end tax adjustment became a hot issue recently, smishing scammers sent text messages with a link to the financial organization website -- a fake website that charges large sums from the phone bill.

A growing number of scammers pretended to be an official of the FSS or a government organization. They asked victims to update their personal confidential information such as bank account, credit card number and pin number. They used this information to withdraw cash or credit cash advances from ATM machines.

Some even worked in teams to extort money from victims in a more systematic way.

Police said Thursday that a team of eight unemployed college graduates were arrested for allegedly extorting 1.1 billion won over five years from some 100 victims in Daegu, North Gyeongsang Province.

These perpetrators worked in pairs so they could withdraw money as quickly as possible from the ATM machines as well as to wipe their history quickly, a Daegu police official told a local media outlet.

In a bid to prevent and minimize the damages of vishing scam victims, the FSS launched a system earlier this week to crack down on “fake bank deposit book” that may be abused by scammers.

In 2012, the FSS introduced measures to prevent phone fraud cases, such as delaying withdrawals of large-sum financial transactions.

By Kim Da-sol (ddd@heraldcorp.com)