A 26-year-old Cuban resident in Galicia, known on TikTok as Estibito, shared on Tuesday how a text message scam left his bank account completely drained about a year ago since he arrived in Spain.
In a video posted on his TikTok profile, the young man explained that it all started when he received a text message that seemed to be from Correos España, informing him that his package could not be delivered due to issues with the address.
The trap worked because the coincidence was perfect: Estibito was indeed expecting a package and lived at a hard-to-find address in a small town. "I was waiting for a package from the post office and then I received a message from the post office... your order could not be delivered because we could not find the address," he explained.
By clicking the link included in the message, he was redirected to a fake website that imitated the design of Correos Express. There, he entered his banking information. "It takes me to a Correos Express page. A yellowish page, all those things are there, and suddenly it asks me to enter the information again... after a while, they charged me a penny from my bank account," he recalled.
He interpreted that minimum charge as a logical penalty for resending the package, without suspecting what was to come next.
During the early hours of the morning, while he was asleep, the scammers began to act. "In the early morning, I went to bed and saw my phone; it beeped €20, €20, two transactions of €20 taken from an ATM... and then suddenly bam, they withdrew the rest of the money from an ATM in Barcelona," he recounted.
When he checked his account at Banco Santander, the result was devastating: "The bank account at 0, family, at 0 in 0."
The young man filed a police report and canceled his cards immediately, but the bank did not refund the money withdrawn from ATMs. He only recovered between 40 and 50 euros for fraudulent online purchases. "They unjustly kept the money, and I could never get it back," he lamented.
This type of fraud, known as smishing, became one of the most widespread scams in Spain during 2025, with thousands of cases reported. The mechanism operates in three phases: sending the phishing SMS, capturing data through a fake webpage, and executing the theft via ATMs or online purchases.
Newly arrived immigrants are particularly vulnerable. Estibito explained it clearly: "There are many hackers, many inventors, many sizes, those that we are not used to seeing in Cuba. Because in Cuba, we normally do not put money in the bank account; we keep everything in cash."
This specific vulnerability of the Cuban community regarding Spanish digital banking is a recurring topic among those who share their adaptation experiences in Spain, where handling cards and online accounts is part of daily life from the very beginning.
In response to the wave of fraud, the Ministry for Digital Transformation of Spain approved measures in February 2025 to combat smishing, and as of May 15, 2026, new regulations are in effect that block the use of counterfeit Spanish numbers from abroad.
Estibito ended his account with a direct message to other Cubans arriving in Spain: "Never click on any links, never answer calls from unknown numbers, never give your information to anyone you don't know, no company, no matter how much they promise you."
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