One woman lost her life savings after falling victim to a false bank scam.
Suni Wan received a text message from someone who she thought was her bank, HSBC at 8.34pm on December 1.
The text told her there was fraudulent activity on her account, which she believed as the message appeared in the same thread as her official HSBC messages appeared.
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.
Upon calling the number, Ms Wan was swindled out of $49,000 (around £25,000).
Suni told A Current Affair: “I was aware not to click on links and emails or attachments. I’m usually on guard.
“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, Ms Wab gave her full name, address and date of birth to the man on the phone.
Ms Wan only grew suspicious when the man on the line started asking questions about her cryptocurrency account Coinspot.
She said: “It finally clicked to me, why would HSBC be concerned about my Coinspot, they wouldn’t pass my details to a representative they would tell me to call Coinspot directly.”
Ms Wan rang HSBC immediately and asked them to freeze her account but the scammers had already taken $49,000 (around £25,000).
They had managed to spoof HSBC’s real number so their message came through on the same thread as a year’s worth of legitimate messages from the bank.
She added: “The hardest thing for me is to stop blaming myself, appreciate I keep blaming myself, maybe I should have noticed it earlier. “
A spokesperson from HSBC told A Current Affair: “For customer confidentiality reasons we can’t converse specific customer situations. HSBC takes customer security very seriously and we thoroughly research any reported cases of scam or fraud.”
“The industry has seen an boost in fraudsters using ‘text spoofing’ to deliberately falsify the telephone number to appear as a genuine bank text message.”
“Scam text messages can even appear in the same message chain as real messages from the organisation, making them even harder to spot.”
HSBC will never ask customers to furnish their 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.
