A previously unseen NFC relay malware family has been deployed alongside a remote access trojan in a single 13-minute phone call, letting a fraudster take out a loan in the victim’s name and relay their card data to a fake terminal while keeping them on the line.
Group-IB documented the case in a technical write-up published on August 12, tracking the NFC malware as WindRelay and attributing the remote access trojan (RAT) to a variant of SpyNote.
The fraudster called posing as a bank employee reporting a problem with the victim’s card, then talked them through installing the first app.
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An App Named After Its Victim
The RAT arrived through the device’s package installer, the standard route for sideloading outside an app store. Its app label carried the victim’s own name, rather than a generic or impersonated brand.
SpyNote ships with a builder toolkit letting an operator set a custom app name, label and package name, so personalization is built in rather than manual effort.
Group-IB said the label pointed to pre-call reconnaissance harvesting the victim’s name and phone number, and meant there was no unfamiliar app name to give the victim pause.
With the RAT active, the fraudster used its remote access to install WindRelay himself, requiring nothing further from the victim. No screen sharing was triggered at any point.
One Tap, Two Payouts
WindRelay’s permissions mapped its purpose: NFC to read the card, INTERNET to stream captures out live, READ_CONTACTS to reach further targets and DUMP, unusual in a third-party app, to inspect device state.
When the victim tapped their card as instructed, the malware acted as a contactless reader, capturing the live exchange between chip and reader including the one-time code generated for that transaction. That exchange was streamed to a second device held by the fraudster, which presented itself as the card to a real terminal.
The fraudster used the same access to take out a loan through the victim’s banking app, which Group-IB read as an opportunistic add-on rather than a planned step. Card transactions began appearing shortly after the call ended.
Group-IB linked WindRelay to 23 samples uploaded to VirusTotal between November 2025 and July 2026, impersonating institutions in Czechia, Slovakia and Slovenia.
Its recommendations to avoid the scam include not treating screen-sharing detection as a proxy for remote access, alerting on app installations from non-official sources during an active call and flagging loan disbursements that coincide with physical card transactions.
