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A Sydney couple has become the latest victim of a sophisticated bank scam costing Australians millions of dollars.
In less than two hours, Sydney couple Ben and Jessica were out of more than $100,000 – their life savings were gone in the blink of an eye.
“It’s years of savings gone up in smoke. It’s a lot of hard work, a lifetime of hard work,” Ben said in an interview.
The fraudster emailed Ben requesting payment for a service he had never used. When Ben called the phone number provided in the email, he was connected with someone claiming to be from PayPal‘s security team.
Macquarie Bank attempted to contact Ben about the suspicious conduct while speaking with the person he believed to be PayPal but could not do so.
“The people were telling me on the phone there were multiple fraudulent transactions, and I had to go through a series of steps to get rid of those transactions,” Ben added.
He had to provide personal information, debit card details, and a series of one-time passcodes to prove his identity and eliminate the fraudulent transactions. Little did he know, those details were being used to worsen the situation.
“Every time they were making a purchase, Ben was actually authorising it with that one-time password,” Jessica said.
Ben and Jessica were shocked to discover that a scammer had used their debit card details linked to their offset account in less than two hours and spent more than $100,000 on purchases in India and Kuwait.
The couple was puzzled and concerned about how the criminal accessed their home loan account. The suspect had logged in with a stolen username and password before transferring $55,000 from the account into an offset account with no spending limit.
It is hoped that Ben and Jessica’s story will warn others to be wary of online scams and protect themselves from falling victim.
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