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A friend of mine send me a SmS he received from his exchange or rather a fake (Luno.com)... stating the following...

"LunoBTC Trader: your LunoBTC account will be De-activated today - 10 August, if not verified on the 2021 API 2FA panel tap=> (Then it gives a link shortener Url) & verify now."

It re-directs to a fake page, where they want you to enter your KYC verification documents. Please do not fall for these phishing Sms's or emails... they just want to use those documents to steal your identity and to signup at other sites to commit fraud.

Be Safe out there.  ;)

I didn't use and I don't even know this exchange. It's good though to share that information to save anyone that might have an account there and prevent others from their phishing attempts.
Perhaps, you should move your topic to Service Discussion > Exchanges (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=223.0) for better viewing. 8)

If you were referring to the one with a ".com" extension, their account recently got suspended ^{[last "cached version (https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:CCQKcAdVpGkJ:https://www.lunobtc.com/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)" that google shows is for last month]}.

If you have the link, we could help to report it as well ^{[it'll speed up the process for taking it down]}.

As far as I know, the exchange will not send announcements or news on our mobile phone instead of sending emails to their members related to the updated news. Maybe it is a new model of scam in some places, but I do not see the importance of checking on the link from the message instead of checking directly on their website. I prefer doing that instead of clicking from the SMS because I see many offers or a tricky way to scam many people every day. But thanks anyway for telling us about the SMS message.

Its phishing site is what you have shown,
phishing site: www.lunobtc.com
official site: https://www.luno.com
and it seems to have been successfully taken down by the hosting provider, and the twitter account @lunobtc has also been suspended (the only social media faked). Looks like the official Luno did have issues verifying customer identity in the past as someone revealed via tweet (https://twitter.com/kot_sk/status/1322847314768252929), then scammers started using the fake account asking for email and phone numbers.

It's worse than that. The scammer will use the victim's KYC to reset the account from the original site. I think the safest way to complain is to contact support privately via the official complaint page instead of expressing frustration on social media.

Archived (https://archive.ph/N0sPL) since the Google cached version is temporary.

I don't know if they will be back after the suspension or not, but at least they are not operational as of now.

The message alone sent to OP is more than enough to make someone suspicious  :D

Thanks for this.

It could also happen for the other exchanges that we use. This scheme gets to the traders if their numbers are leaked or they've used it to sign up to a fishy website.

No, I believe there's another one ^{[unless I misunderstood that part]}. @Kakmakr (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5353744.msg57663470#msg57663470) mentioned LunoBTC gave a URL from one of those link shorteners and that redirected to another page:

• Quote from: Kakmakr on August 10, 2021, 05:24:39 PM
  (Then it gives a link shortener Url) & verify now.
  
  It re-directs to a fake page, where they want you to enter your KYC verification documents.
  

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Thank you, I totally forgot about that part. Not sure why the part that shows the date, goes away as soon as everything has completely loaded:

https://i.imgur.com/YjBiJN7.jpg

There is many bad things they can do with those documents and a little bit of social engineering! But the first thing they will attempt is to access your friend's Luno account with his login credentials and if he has 2fa enabled, they will request disabling it using his documents since they will be required to confirm personal information.

But the real question your friend should ask is how they know he has an account on that exchange and from where they did get his phone number? It's either someone he knows or his information got leaked from one of the services he uses. In both cases he should be careful and reset all his passwords as a precautionary measure.

It's also possible that the scammers were mass sending to randomly generated numbers and betting on the chances there might be some who has an account. I remember there were times I received scam messages in a new phone number I've never used nor given out to anyone yet.

It's unfortunate that we can only minimize getting phishing attacks which is why educating oneself on how to distinguish one from another is a must. Reading articles/guides + taking phishing tests would be a good start.

This type of scam attempt can be happen not only for the site luno but also for any sites. If anyone think they should verify their account according to the page then there might have several problem. As they will be able to collect mobile number, email, kyc document. By which they may commit fraud and also they may take control of the user who will provide such an information. So, we should not click on any link if we do not get instantly for asking it. Also, we should double check if we still click the link to avoid any fraud/scam.