A bank teller has been praised for saving a customer from losing millions in a cruel romance scam.
The woman approached Marlena Karbowski at the Westpac branch in Liverpool, Western Sydney, and asked to scrap her home insurance as she was planning to sell up.
Ms Karbowski asked why she was selling her home after noticing the customer apppeared nervous.
The woman initially said she was ‘helping out her son’, but capitulated and admitted it was to get her boyfriend freed from an overseas jail.
The teller immediately realised something was amiss and asked the woman into her office to investigate further.
Westpac bank teller Marlena Karbowski (pictured) saved a customer from a cruel scam
Ms Karbowski asked the woman when her boyfriend had last taken her out for a coffee, to which she replied: ‘Actually, never, we met online.’
She asked the woman for a photo of her supposed boyfriend and ran a reverse image search through Google.
The results proved the man was not who he claimed to be.
‘All the photos she received were online, but with different names,’ Ms Karbowski told 9News.
‘We cried together and I walked her to the police station to report it.
‘We care and when we see those red flags, we act.’
The customer isn’t the only Aussie being targeted by ‘romance scams’, with over $34million lost to similiar fraudsters in 2023, according to the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission’s ScamWatch.
The majority of victims are aged between 55 and 64 years old.
Despite being the second most damaging type of scam in Australia, it is still dwarfed by investment scams which conned Aussies out of $290million.
Ms Karbowski found out the woman was looking to sell her home to get her supposed ‘boyfriend’ out of an overseas jail
Westpac on Tuesday revealed an artificial intelligence-powered feature called SaferPay that will protect their customers.
SaferPay identifies ‘high-risk’ transactions and will ‘prompt you with a few quick questions to get more information’ such as why the payment is being made and who it’s going to.
‘While our prevention measures have led to a considerable drop in customer losses over the last year, fraudsters are still taking millions of dollars from our customers each month,’ Westpac CEO, Peter King, said in a statement.
‘This innovation is the first of its kind in Australia and will add important friction to payments deemed to have high scam risk.’
