When a Nelson mother received a frantic WhatsApp message from her daughter last week requesting help, she obliged with her debit card details and was scammed more than $7,500.
Martine says she is usually very scam savvy, but the call for help played on a mother’s emotions and the perceived stress of her daughter meant it all happened very quickly.
Scammers had accessed her daughter’s WhatsApp account and the language used in the messaging mimicked the language of her daughter, convincing Martine that her daughter in Auckland was in trouble with a broken phone and no money.
“She said ‘mum, I’m stressing, what do I do?’ She had no phone, no access to money, so as a mother I said of course, what do you need? It was just as I would talk to my daughter, so no alarm bells went off. I finished with the feeling of great, she’s sorted.”
That feeling changed the next day when Kiwibank phoned her to ask about money going out of her account. In total, $4,000 was spent on her debit card and the account was used for two payments to the foreign exchange company Wise, adding up to more than $7,500 from her account.
“When I got that call from the bank, my heart just hit the floor. I just can’t believe I’ve been scammed. It was all so quick that I didn’t have time to think and they had all the answers.
“I’m just devastated. Gutted. I don’t have much money and it’s a huge amount of money to me.”
The payments to Wise can be retrieved, but the $4,000 on her debit card is not so clear. Martine says banks need to support customers who lose money to sophisticated scams, which are becoming harder to identify.
“Now with AI (artificial intelligence), the average human doesn’t stand a chance.”
Last week Richmond Police was contacted about three different scam frauds in just 15 minutes and community constable Kyle Abbott says people are being conned into losing, sometimes, thousands of dollars.
Facebook Marketplace results in regular complaints to the police and he says one $700 mobile phone was recently sold 10 times to different buyers over three to four days, which resulted in about $7,000 in the scammer’s pocket. Scammers copy photos of goods from legitimate trading sites such as Trade Me and place them on Facebook Marketplace.
His advice when buying goods from Facebook Marketplace or similar is to view the trade before buying.
“If you can’t front up and check it, be prepared to lose your money.”
Another Facebook scam involving a fake profile requested a money transfer with the promise of receiving a larger sum of money, which resulted in a Richmond person losing $7,750.
One local woman, befriended by a scammer, ended up spending $10,000 on her credit card in just a month to buy iTunes and Steam cards for her “friend” who was claiming to be in trouble. Constable Abbott says the scammer would then sell those cards for “a lot more”.
“I just hate people giving their money away to people who don’t care.”
Often, people who have been successfully scammed will be scammed again and again because their details have been sold to other scammers, he says.
“There are people I’ve dealt with here who have lost hundreds of thousands of dollars over several scams. A lot of this comes down to loneliness and I encourage younger people to keep in touch with the older members of your family and look after elderly in the community.”
It is not just older people being scammed though and he says the younger ones are often too embarrassed to admit they have been scammed.
For the younger generation, sextortion is one of the biggest threats, when scammers request sexual photos of the victim and then use those photos to blackmail them. Constable Abbott says younger people get scammed that way because sexual photos have become normalised among their generation.
“If in doubt, treat everything as a scam. We get one reported every day. Some people have lost thousands of dollars and there are people who have lost houses.”
He says scams continue to evolve and one of the recent methods used locally was a phone call to someone, claiming to calling on behalf of potential scam victim’s mother who had been rushed to hospital without her wallet.
The scammer claimed the mother had asked them to contact the daughter for card details to get a taxi home. In that case, the woman targeted by the scammer was suspicious and contacted her mother, who was quite safe at home.
