Yahoo Finance TikToker Millie Ford loses $1,000 to shopping scam: 'Scary'
The Aussie TikTok star is warning others about the online shopping scam.
One of Australia’s biggest TikTok stars, Millie Ford, has shared that she was scammed out of $1,000 by online fraudsters.
Ford, who is known for her comedy TikToks and has a following of 1.5 million on the platform, said it all started when she saved her bank details on an online shopping website.
From there, hackers were able to steal her personal information and started making unauthorised purchases in her name.
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Ford said she noticed something was wrong when she started getting “hundreds of spam emails”.
“I took a closer look and realised the hoards of emails were covering up real confirmation emails of purchases from a website that were not made by me,” Ford told Daily Mail.
“My card details were saved to my account for an online store and the hackers had been using them to purchase items.
“Turns out this scam process happened four times before I figured out what had happened. Overall, I lost about $1,000.”
Ford said the situation was “frustrating” and “scary” because she didn’t know how much money was stolen from her or what she was supposed to do next.
“I learnt my lesson not to save my details on a website, though, even though I thought it was safe to do so,” she said.
“There is no shame in being hacked, and the more people that are aware of the risk, the safer everyone can be - especially young people who spend a lot of time online and might not think it will happen to them!”
‘Be careful’
The Australian Cyber Security Centre has told Aussies to “be careful” when saving their payment information on online shopping accounts.
“If you do save payment information to an account, you should turn on multi-factor authentication (MFA) to protect it,” the government body said.
“Where this is not possible, set a long, complex and unique passphrase as the account’s password to help keep cybercriminals out. You could also use a password manager to generate and store passwords for you.”
Aussies lost more than $9 million to online shopping scams last year. More than 17,800 reports of the scam were made, with people aged 35-44 the most common victims.
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