One woman had trusted a man she considered a Westpac employee before an eight-word phrase saved her from disaster.
Eight words saved a woman from destruction by an extremely sophisticated fraudster who targeted her while she was not well with Covid-19.
Chantelle of Victoria received what appeared to be a legitimate text message from Medicare, informing her that she was in close contact with the Omicron case and had to order a test.
Medicare: You have been in close contact with someone who has signed a contract with Omicron. You must order a free PCR test kit at: “reads the text, which included a link to a fake Medicare website.
Services Australia last week warned Australians against the potentially dangerous text and told recipients to delete it from their phone immediately.
After clicking on the link, Chantelle was able to pay $ 1.49 for a test kit to be delivered to her door.
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She was experiencing “all of Covid’s symptoms at the time, so I didn’t think clearly,” she said 7 Newsso continue with the experience of buying the kit.
Shortly after sending the payment, Chantel’s phone started receiving calls.
“The phone rang twice, one after the other, so I decided it had to be really important,” she told the paper.
The man on the other line was a Briton who “spoke quite well” and told her that she had been stung by a simple scam that Westpac Bank would protect her from.
The man, posing as a Westpac employee, said her fraudsters tried to take $ 1,000 from her account before the bank intercepted the transaction.
After raising her suspicions to the man that he may be a fraud, she was told in a Google number so she could see that she belonged to the bank.
“Of course it’s under Westpac,” she said.
After securing her trust, the man told Chantelle that he would receive a text containing a confirmation code that she would need.
“The text came up right away, but I was still a little unsure, so he asked if I had a landline so I could call the bank to confirm,” she said.
Her next move was what saved her from disaster.
“That’s why I told him, ‘I’m going to close now and call the bank,'” she said.
“Then I heard a thud and he left.”
That he ended the conversation was all she needed to confirm that he was a hacker.
Chantelle was shaken by the experience and has a new assessment of how easily people can be deceived into giving away their savings.
Westpac said it would never use verification codes when accepting payments.
The hacker pretends to be a real estate agency
Chantelle’s experience is one of thousands reported by Australians each week, including a woman from Western Australia who last month revealed she lost more than $ 700,000 after opening an email.
She was in the process of buying a property in Perth last month when she received an email from her settlement agent, who she said was requested that the money be deposited in a bank account before settlement.
“Authentic-looking documents” were attached, but the devastating thing turned out to be the whole thing.
The fraudsters used a shared Hotmail email address with the agency’s name and included bank account details in an account they controlled. They stole $ 732,000.
Fraudsters use pornographic content
Hackers have begun to take sharp steps to target the Australian dumping business pornographic content on their Facebook pages in a disturbing attack.
Brisbane woman Anita Platt shared her story that she was hacked in the middle of the night a little over a month ago, waking up from a wave of Facebook emails.
“Everything was done at 2.50 in the morning, so by the time I woke up and saw it, it was too late,” Ms. Platt told 9 News.
The scammer recovered Ms. Platt’s password, added a new email address, and changed her security settings before wreaking havoc on the business pages of Dibble Locksmiths and Australian Security Brokers (ASB) on Facebook.
The cyber thief changed the profile photos of the two businesses to show women in spicy outfits before posting pornographic content on the pages.
Targeted mothers on Instagram
Overseas hackers recently defrauded mothers on Instagram with more than $ 20,000 in dishonest techniques that included presenting themselves like them online.
Brisbane influencer and entrepreneur Anna van Dyke, who maintains an Instagram page with more than 28,000 followers, stole her identity after she was sent an email with a link in it.
“It seemed 100 percent legal,” she said.
But after clicking on the link, Ms. van Dyke was hacked and disconnected from her account.
Internet thieves took over her page, posing as an influencer, while asking her followers to invest in a scheme.
It is estimated that about $ 24,000 was transferred by local hacker mothers.
According to ScamWatch, Australians lost more than $ 205 million from fraud between January 1 and May 1 this year.
The Authority said text fraud increased by 54 percent between the two dates, surpassing phone calls as the most common contact for fraudsters.
