Sri Lanka CERT has told the public not to be taken in by a message spreading on social media that claims a leading Sri Lankan bank is giving away a special gift to mark Vap Poya Day.
The bank has announced no such offer and has started no such scheme, the Daily Mirror reported, citing the national computer emergency readiness team.
The message is believed to be a scam built to collect personal information, banking credentials and other sensitive data. Sri Lanka CERT warned that anyone who falls for it risks having their bank account compromised.
What CERT is telling people to do
The advice is specific and short:
- Do not click any link attached to the message.
- Do not enter personal or banking details on websites reached through it.
- Check any promotional offer through the bank’s own official channels before acting on it.
Vap Poya Day falls on Sunday the 25th, according to Newswire, which reported the same advisory and said CERT issued it in a statement. The timing is the point of the lure: a festival date supplies a plausible reason for a bank to be handing out gifts, and a deadline that discourages checking.
The bank is not named
Neither report identifies the bank being impersonated, describing it only as a leading bank. That limits how much a reader can do with the warning — someone who receives the message cannot match it against a named institution, and customers of every other bank get no signal either way.
Nor does either filing say where the message is circulating, how widely, what the link leads to, or whether anyone has lost money.
Sourcing
The Daily Mirror is the only verified newsroom this desk found carrying the advisory; a search returned no filing from Hiru News, NewsFirst or EconomyNext, and Ada Derana remains unreachable behind a CloudFront block. Newswire is included above as a second account of the same statement, but it is an aggregator and does not count toward this article’s credibility rating. Sri Lanka CERT is the primary source for both.
