Caixa introduced the anniversary withdrawal method in 2019, allowing employees to annually withdraw part of their FGTS balance – Severance Indemnity Fund. After accepting the option, the employee who signed up for the birthday withdrawal can still take out loans from Caixa or other financial institutions and advance the amounts for the coming years.

Thus, the FGTS balance can also be used as a credit guarantee, helping those who need it most. However, the amount can become a big headache for those who are victims of scammers, if they take the amounts in the workers' name.

It is worth remembering that the worker is not obliged to adhere to the birthday withdrawal method. And anyone who opts for this modality will only be able to return to withdrawal-termination (the one in which the worker is fired) after two years of detention.

In the birthday withdrawal scam, criminals enter the official application with the victims' login and password and request the loan. As the bank understands that this is a normal action, it ends up granting the amounts without the suspicion of fraud.

Therefore, even if the worker is fired, with the adoption of the birthday withdrawal, he will not be able to withdraw his FGTS amounts, only the annual value of a portion of the fund, even if he is fired without just cause.

Another way for scammers to take the birthday withdrawal amounts is to activate the modality and try to make the loan, without even the worker having requested the option. This means that the worker cannot make withdrawals for a period of 2 years, even when fraudsters activate it in their name.

According to Caixa Econômica Federal, there have been many attempts to make improper FGTS withdrawals, although the bank does not disclose how many cases have occurred.

For these cases, the bank has implemented a special form. According to Caixa, the document contains information for fraud analysis and will be forwarded to the police authorities if necessary.

In a note, Caixa explained that the bank uses several protection and monitoring mechanisms to improve the security of its systems and mitigate the actions of fraudsters, such as data validation, password authentication, document validation and second-factor authentication.

According to experts, Caixa has not yet provided explanations on how scammers are able to access workers' FGTS accounts.

For them, there is a serious lack of data protection, as banks cannot escape blame in these cases, as workers are the most affected.

There are even cases in which scammers managed to access the accounts of people who were not registered with Caixa. To do this, they used a fake email and a random cell phone number.

Caixa informs users that there are some ways to avoid this type of scam. To achieve this, some measures are important:

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