Scammers are using increasingly sophisticated methods to mimic banks’ fraud departments to steal money from customers, a leading fraud recovery law firm has warned.
Solicitors say the fraudsters are using new tricks to convince bank customers that they are genuine. It includes using the same telephone hold music as their bank, cloning the bank’s phone number and telling victims they can check on Google and asking the victim to confirm details such as their overdraft limit.
Once the scammers have the victim’s trust, they tell them that their bank account has been hacked and persuade them to download software on to their computer. This software allows the fraudster to access the bank accounts and steal the money.
The National Fraud Helpline says that, although the pretence of being from a bank’s fraud team was a common scam, the additional elements make it unusually sophisticated.
One jeweller had nearly £50,000 stolen when he was tricked into giving access to his bank account after they called pretending to be from Barclays fraud team. The businessman, who is in his 70s, said the long-established family firm is still recovering.
He received a phone call from someone claiming to be ‘Andrew’ from Barclays, who warned him of unusual activity on his account.
He was told a payment of £18,123 had been paid to Energy One Limited. The number that they called him on was cloned.
“I checked it was a genuine Barclays number, and they asked me to confirm my overdraft limit for security reasons,” he said.
“They even used the same horrible hold music that Barclays play, which I’ve heard so many times before in legitimate circumstances. There seemed no reason to think it was not them.”
Believing he was now speaking to ‘Charlie Adams’, he was instructed to log in to his business bank accounts on his PC.
I got up in the middle of the night, went downstairs, logged into the accounts, and saw that they had left a few pence in them
From there he unknowingly downloaded AnyDesk, a programme that gives third parties access to your computer.
“They said the screen would go blank, and then that was the end of it,” he said. “Nothing more happened after that and I assumed they must have sorted it out.
“But during the night, I was lying awake thinking ‘this is a strange thing that’s been going on’. I got up in the middle of the night, went downstairs, logged into the accounts, and saw that they had left a few pence in them. I was devastated.”
In all, the fraudsters had taken £48,451.78 from two accounts. The National Fraud Helpline solicitors has, so far, recovered £25,650 of it.
Helpline lawyer Lena Abuagla, said: “Scammers will use every trick in the book to convince victims that they are genuine. Using the same hold music as the bank involves a lot of planning. This was a very sophisticated scam.”
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