A woman has been fleeced out of $50,000 in an elaborate fraud involving Telstra and ANZ.
Veronica McCann is used to stomach-churning situations in her race car driving career but says none of it compares to the horror of learning she’d been scammed.
The 40-year-old left a meeting to learn she had no phone reception and later found emails from Telstra revealing her login and phone number had been changed.
“I literally thought it was a mobile phone issue. I didn’t click that it was anything more sinister going on,” she said.
The scammer had tricked the telco and exploited a little-known loophole designed for domestic violence victims.
The cyber criminal pretended they had fled a dangerous situation without a phone.
Once they gained access to her account, they targeted her bank.
It happened in the space of two hours.
“Heart drops, feel sick for the rest of the day, physically feel sick,” McCann said.
“I called my husband and said, ‘You need to call ANZ and tell them to shut our accounts because we’ve been hacked’ and it’s just a horrible horrible feeling from that point.”
Somehow, the scammers had also changed her voice ID to hack into her accounts.
McCann said she was still waiting for answers on how the criminals were able to authorise so many things without alarm bells going off.
“That should have been a red flag,” she said.
In the meantime, she said ANZ agreed to refund the stolen money but only after she first shared her story on Perth radio station 6PR this morning.
In a statement, the bank called the scam “appalling”, saying it was “continually reviewing and adjusting its capabilities” as new ones emerge.
Telstra said “the scammer was able to answer” the right questions to access her account and it appeared they committed identity theft “prior to any interaction with Telstra”.
