The US lost an incomprehensible $12.5 billion to scammers last year. A woman from Toronto became yet another victim of the fraudsters, and was scammed out of thousands thinking she was talking to her bank.
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Usually, scammers will go for people a little older and more gullible than 35-year-old Courtney. However, these clever tricksters still managed to pull the wool over her eyes. She believed she was speaking with the fraud department of her bank. In actual fact, she was giving away all her details to a group of scammers.
They proceeded to steal thousands of dollars. She has since taken to social media to warn people of the dangers. Currently, in the US, three in ten people are victims of some kind of financial scam. There is so little help or guidance out there. Courtney has taken it upon herself to educate people about the risks involved with scammers.
Clever Scammers With Belivable Stories
The way they caught out Courtney was by having credentials. She wasn't foolish enough to fall for any old scam like the woman who thought she was dating Brad Pitt. They had a number of elements to their story that made it believable.
"I was getting call after call after call," she said in her TikTok post. "I Google the number and I see that it's the same number on the back of my credit card. So on the third time that they called, I picked up." They then went on in a very official manner, making her feel much more at ease.
The scammers even went through her recent transactions with her, which matched up with real ones. "I still can't figure out how he got that information," she wondered afterwards. From there, they had her on the hook.
The scammers told her they would send an authentication code to her, which she was to give them. What she didn't realise is that she was giving them the two-factor authentication code to her online banking. "After that, he was already in my accounts, emptying them and making charges on my credit card and then transferring all my money from my checking and my savings." The scammer had emptied all of her accounts of all her savings.
She called the real bank and was in touch with a real fraud investigator. She has since gone to the police. "The police said they see this happen multiple times a day, every single day," she said. You can't trust anyone.
The best thing to do, if you ever get contacted by someone claiming to be financial is to hang up on them and call them back on an official number. Banks will almost never call.
