And Another One…

Just before I get into this one, my op went well. Unfortunately, I’m peeing a lot as I’m having to flush my system through to make sure I don’t get any infection. Bit of a pain, but at least things are working again.

In the meantime, a little serendipity – if that’s the word. I recall the day I first heard Bat Out of Hell. It was in Tiffany’s nightclub on one of the Tuesday heavy night sessions in 1977 or possibly early ’78. Tiffany’s was situated at the top of Redland hill just off Durdham Downs in Bristol. I heard about Meatloaf’s death 44 years later just after coming round from the anaesthetic having had my op. I had the procedure carried out in the Spire Glen Hospital, which now sits where Tiffany’s once was. I just thought it a bit twiglet zone…

Anyway

A young woman has lost thousands of pounds after falling victim to a sophisticated delivery text scam.

Emma Spencer, 31, fell foul of an Authorised Push Payment (APP) scam after receiving a text at the start of December, supposedly from Royal Mail, claiming a parcel couldn’t be delivered unless she paid £2.

Another one bites the dust.

There is nothing sophisticated about this scam. It is very simple and easy to spot. Okay, sometimes I’ll get a text from a delivery company to tell me they are planning to deliver a parcel. On very rare occasions, they might tell me that they missed me and I have to rearrange delivery. The Royal Mail leaves a card. They do not text you because how would they know your telephone number?

So even if you are expecting a parcel and there is that brief second when you think the text is linked to it, the matter is resolved with just a second’s thought. What you don’t do is click the link and give the scammers your banking details, because no legitimate delivery service would ask you to do so. There is no fee for redelivery unless there is a customs fee – in which case, you get a card and if you go onto the legitimate website, you will find the details when you put in the reference number.

Yet still we see victims… and we see victims expecting the banks to bail them out.

Concerned about the supposedly missed delivery, Emma filled in her bank details to make the £2 payment.

This is the first facepalm moment. Because no one, absolutely no one will ask for this and the banks, post office et al have said this repeatedly. How many times do they have to say it?

The first sign of trouble came two days later when Emma received a text from her bank, Lloyds, asking for a confirmation code for a £2,300 transaction that had been attempted on Harvey Nichols’ website using her details.

Emma, who is from London, knew she had not made the transaction – and never shopped at Harvey Nichols – so she rightly withheld the code.

Within minutes she received a phone call from someone who identified themselves as a ‘fraud investigator’ from Lloyds, who said he was going to help her protect her account.

He asked her about several transactions and she confirmed whether she had made them or not.

Believing this was genuinely a representative of Lloyds, Emma was persuaded to transfer all of the funds in her ISA and bank account, all of her life savings, to a supposedly ‘safer’ account.

FFS! Seriously, every time I see someone fall for this scam, I get ever more angry. How many times do the banks have to tell people that they do not ever, ever, ever do this? Never. Even if you’ve fallen for the original £2 payment for delivery bait, the moment someone says they want to move your money into a ‘safe’ account, it’s a scam. This is not exactly a secret. These scams have been around for a long time and they are about as sophisticated as their victims.

Emma said: ‘It sounds so silly now when I say it but obviously they had ground me down for an hour, plus they had asked me security questions so I assumed they were legit.’

She phoned Lloyds immediately, only to discover that it was too late and all her money was gone.

A fool and her money, I’m afraid. That might sound harsh, but not only were all the red flags doing a choreographed light fandango, but the sky was aflame with a fireworks display and the sound was akin to the Western Front during an allied offensive and she ignored them all. When you are called by someone supposedly from your bank, you hang up, wait for a bit or use another line and call the legitimate number that you have and check. If it is a genuine call, they will understand.

Emma said: ‘What is most upsetting is that when I speak to people at Lloyds, I am made to feel like this is all my fault as I physically transferred money and took out the loan.

That’s because it was.

It might be that there are things banks can do to tighten up security, but if their customers willingly give money to scammers, there isn’t a huge amount they can do to stop it and I fail to see why they (i.e. their other customers) should pick up the tab.

Lloyds said its investigation found that Emma provided the fraudster with enough secure information – which should be known only to the customer – to allow them to make a number of internal transfers from her Lloyds Bank savings account to her Lloyds Bank current account via its automated telephone banking service.

Shrugs. Darwin in action.

On scams and scamming, a friend of mine was targeted a few days ago. Her son is at university and he apparently sent her a text from a different number to his usual one telling her that he had accidentally put his phone through the wash and needed money to buy a new one. As this seemed odd to her and her antennae were twitching, she phoned him on his normal number and he answered, completely bemused by the washing machine story. She did message the scammers back with just two words…

21 Comments

  1. I take it you’ve had the dreaded TURP – trans urinary reduction process… If so I know what you’re going through – I had it two years ago. The good news is mine cleared up really quickly and all is still working well. Hell of a relief!

  2. It beggars belief what people will fall for.
    Watch ‘scambaiter’ channel on YouTube. It doesn’t seem to click that something is amiss when the bank is telling people to refund a payment that the bank made by taking gift cards and/or cash and sending it in books to India.
    Honestly. It’s mad.
    Most of the time it’s just Muppets giving access.
    In what world would your bank ring you up, make a mistake while on the phone, then ask you to refund the mistake yourself with Amazon gift cards?

    • Jim Browning has covered this one. He sometimes manages to get hold of the mark and they don’t believe him. One even phoned the scammer to tell them that Browning was trying to scam him. There is no hope, frankly.

  3. A lot of the victims are elderly and just incapable of identifying scams. I know of many cases where highly intelligent, sensible people have suffered huge losses because their antennae no longer function as well. Those cases need protection not blaming.

    • That’s a fairly common generalisation. My father is in his late eighties and he’d have spotted this one coming. When the BMW club treasurer fell for this one and lost the club in the region of £20k, my father said much as I have here and was likewise livid at such stupidity on the part of someone who should have known better. My mother in law, who is slightly older, is more inclined to naïveté. So age alone isn’t really the issue, it’s down to individual susceptibility. And, the banks do say repeatedly, that they will not call you and ask you to move money around. If you have an elderly relative that you feel might be at risk, then you have to take responsibility for briefing them up to the risks. But, then many – like my father – don’t do online banking, which is a bit of a blessing as it reduces the risk.

  4. I got one of the “Tax Refund” phishing emails the other day. It actually looked quite genuine – none of the speeling misteaks they often have. But a “Click on the link below” was the giveaway – and I’m definitely NOT due a refund, in any case. So I looked at the Message Source, and Googled the IP address used by the sender. Lo & Behold it showed up as an ISP in Australia! Now I know our civil servants are determined to keep their WFH scam going as along as possible, but I doubt that working from “DownUnder” is going a realistic option for the majority of staff. Even less believable was the claim that refunds would normally be made within 2 weeks…

    • One of my colleagues is working remotely from Spain and the work involves (legitimately) asking people for money.

  5. Glad the op went well. Don’t over do things, general anaesthetics can take it out of you.

    I got a text from Queensland Health telling me to self-isolate and get tested for covid as I was supposedly a close contact of someone who was positive. The text had a link in it for more information. I just deleted it and, since I wasn’t ill, got on with my life. It may have been legit, and it may not have been. If someone followed up, which they didn’t, I would have said that I don’t respond to unsolicited texts with links in them.

  6. I get the occasional scam phone call. The last one was:
    “I’m calling about your life insurance policy.”
    “Oh, yes, Which one?” (I haven’t got a life insurance policy.)
    “Aviva.”
    “OK, just let me find the policy number then you can confirm it and we’ll go from there.”
    He hung up. I have no idea why. 🙂

  7. My mum’s landline gets many of these. Picked it up recently to be told by a foreign sounding woman it was BT calling about the broadband. I smelt a rat immediately.

    She asked me if I (assuming I was my mum) was the sole user of the broadband. I asked what difference that made? I said it doesn’t sound like something BT needed to know, so she said she’d sent me a text. I replied that she would have found that difficult as I had no mobile phone (my mum doesn’t use one). She called me a liar, I replied that she was the liar here and hung up.

    Went back to the living room and my own mobile showed a text. They’d somehow linked my mum’s landline to my mobile phone! It was showing a temporary PIN and a warning to use it once (yeah, right!).

    Now, I have used my mobile to contact BT when my mum has had problems. So…did the scammer get it from BT?

  8. So ‘your bank’ phones and tries this obvious scam. Anyone with a brain will phone the bank on a different phone and check with them if they are unsure. To be told it is a scam as banks never ask clients to move money for safety neither do the police et al. There is plenty of info about many of these scams including the lost and dead phone scams too.

  9. I like to keep them busy with nonsensical requests of proof if I have the time to spare. If I’m keeping them busy then they’re bothering at least one person less.

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