Sophie* had just moved house, so it made sense to her mother to receive a message from her daughter asking for money for an urgent bill. “Hi Mum it’s me,” said the message, explaining that she had broken her phone and was using a different one. “She dropped everything to sort it out,” says Sophie of her mother, who had begun the process of transferring £3,000. But the message was not to be trusted. The transfer was destined for a scammer. At that moment, Sophie – the real Sophie – happened to text her mother with an update on her new kitten, which they had picked up together a few days earlier.
Sophie’s mother rang her “in blind panic, convinced she had just been talking to me.” Fortunately, Sophie’s mother alerted her bank and Action Fraud; although she hadn’t yet sent any money, the scammer now had her account details. In the end, no financial loss was incurred, but some embarrassment was. “It made me angry that afterwards she felt embarrassed by it,” says Sophie, “when the whole point of the scam is to exploit a parent’s instinct.”
