Yahoo Finance The mistake that lost Sydney woman $49,000 in sophisticated scam
The Sydney woman lost $49,000 in the space of 30 minutes.
A Sydney woman has lost her life savings after falling for a scam bank text and said there was one thing that convinced her to “let her guard down”.
Suni Wan received a text message from her bank, HSBC, telling her there was fraudulent activity on her account. The message didn’t look unusual because it appeared in the same thread official HSBC messages appeared in.
The text claimed a new device had logged into her account and that, if it wasn’t her, she needed to call the number in the message immediately.
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“I was aware not to click on links and emails or attachments. I’m usually on guard,” Suni told A Current Affair. “But because the text message came from the HSBC number, I let my guard down.”
Suni called the purported HSBC number and was told a Samsung S8 phone had logged onto her account - a phone she coincidentally previously owned.
Worried someone was using her old phone to access her bank account, Suni gave her full name, address and date of birth to the man on the phone.
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He then asked her to generate a one-time passcode on her phone and to hand it over so he could fix the issue for her.
"Then he said there's been some unusual activities and he put me on hold for quite a while," Suni said.
She only realised something was wrong when the man started asking her questions about her cryptocurrency account, Coinspot.
She immediately hung up the call and rang HSBC directly to freeze her account. But it was too late - the scammers had already managed to clean out her bank account and steal $49,000 within the space of 30 minutes.
The fraudsters had managed to spoof HSBC’s number and were able to send fake messages in the same message thread Suni had received more than a year’s worth of legitimate messages from the bank.
"The hardest thing for me is to stop blaming myself, like I keep blaming myself. Maybe I should have noticed it earlier," Suni said.
Aussies lose $11 million to the scams
Aussies have lost a staggering $92 million to impersonation scams this year, according to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, with $11 million lost to bank-impersonation scams like the one Suni fell victim to.
Yahoo Finance previously spoke to a couple who lost close to $50,000 in a similar phone call scam where the caller pretended to work for HSBC and claimed there had been suspicious activity on their account. A number of other HSBC customers have since contacted us, saying they had been targeted by the same scam.
HSBC has said it cannot comment on specific customer situations for customer-confidentiality reasons.
A bank spokesperson told A Current Affair there had been an increase in scammers using “text spoofing” to make their messages appear genuine.
“Scam text messages can even appear in the same message chain as real messages from the organisation, making them even harder to spot,” the spokesperson said.
“HSBC will never ask you to provide your PINs, passwords or verification codes on a phone call, in response to a text message or email. Bank customers need to be vigilant about the risk of scams and are reminded to never give out bank codes or passwords.”
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