Sandra Horma, a member of the association's fraud prevention committee who works at LHV Bank, told ERR that according to Police and Border Guard Board statistics, Estonian residents had lost €23 million to fraud as of October.

"That is a truly enormous sum. We see that, unfortunately, bank fraud ranks very high among these cases, which means that it appears as if the call came from the person's own home bank, usually the cybersecurity department or some other kind of secret-operations-style unit, and the narrative is about 'saving' the money. In reality, the money is not saved at all; instead, the person's accounts are taken over and emptied," she outlined.

Horma said fraudsters have not become especially active in recent weeks, but people have begun talking more about the problem.

Common scams include calls from the Health Insurance Fund, police, or the electricity company Elektrilevi, usually in Estonian. There has also been an uptick in seasonal with callers claiming to be from postal or delivery services.

The Banking Association's fraud prevention department discussed the topic this week, and Horma noted that various measures are under constant consideration.

One recurring issue is limits, but there was also discussion about implementing multi-layer authentication and running campaigns to ensure people are aware of the issue.

One measure that is also being considered is the so-called "cooling-off" pause for exceptional transfers.

For example, if a pensioner who lives modestly suddenly transfers their decades-long savings to some unknown account, this transaction would not be processed immediately, but only after a delay.

"I personally say that I would be very happy if we were talking about a much broader target group, but yes, whether it is a pensioner, a young person, an entrepreneur — if something suddenly happens that is very unusual, truly a very, very large transfer, then that is one option we can look at to see whether it might help," Horma said.

However, a "cooling-off pause" would only be useful if the person themselves realizes that someone has tried to take something from their account. If, on the other hand, the person wants to make the transfer voluntarily and does not inform either the bank or the police, then, according to Horma, the pause would not help either.

"So we are thinking about it, but there is no concrete plan yet," Horma said.

Responding to criticism that banks should do more, Horma said they save enormous amounts of potential victims' money every day.

"We also cooperate with the Police and Border Guard Board as well as with other institutions such as CERT and Smart-ID, the SK ID Solutions company itself, to strengthen these measures," she confirmed. "We see how much money we save every day in various places, precisely in such cases. But unfortunately, some of it still gets through, and that is the inevitability."

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