A takeaway owner says she has lost over £1,000 in a suspected scam on food delivery service Just Eat.
Sammy Davies, owner of Sammy's Milkshakes Wonders, said she has been left "absolutely devastated" after falling victim to the suspected scam. She said that a convincing "hacker" gained her trust, before logging into her account, changing her business' bank details and pocketing her profits.
The restaurant owner had been in touch with Just Eat a week prior due to a fault with her ordering machine, and says she had "no reason" to suspect that a call she received on Monday afternoon was not genuine, North Wales Live reported. Sammy says that the scammer knew all of her account details, including her login and password, leading her to believe that the phone call was legitimate.
"I'd been calling back and forth all week trying to get the issue with my machine sorted so when he called me I thought nothing of it," she said.
"He knew my login details, my password, my phone number, he knew that I was waiting for this new machine to arrive. So I obviously believed it because he knew all my information."
However, Sammy says she realised something wasn't right when she didn't receive her weekly payment later that week.
"When it got to Friday when I was supposed to get paid, I went onto my account, there was nothing there, so then I started thinking 'What's going on?' That's when I started panicking, that's when I first thought something's not right."
She said that she called Just Eat three times and that each time she was reassured that the money would soon be deposited into her account. But on Friday afternoon, she said a Just Eat worker to told her the bank details had been changed and her week's profits had been paid into a stranger's account.
"When she said that I was just in shock, I was so worried about what I was going to do. Without this money I can't pay my staff, I can't open, I could lose everything," said Sammy, from Wrexham.
"I just feel like someone's come into my home and burgled me, I just don't feel safe."
Sammy claims it took several days to notice that her account details had been changed, and when they finally realised, it was too late.
"He changed them on Monday and it took until Friday and me calling multiple times a day for someone to notice," she said.
"I was phoning and panicking all day and it was there in front of their faces, the lady on the phone even told me if it had been spotted at nine o'clock in the morning then it could've been stopped. How has this massive worldwide company not spotted this?"
After Sammy posted her story on social media, a number of people reached out to offer support, with one man from local delivery service Wrexham Eats even giving her £300 to help to pay her staff.
"It might only be one week's wage but that one week's wage is our lifeline, I'm so grateful for that," she said.
Sammy says that she hasn't been contacted by Just Eat since being informed that she had been a victim of fraud: "When I spoke to them on Friday they said someone would call me back but I haven't heard anything. It feels like we've just been left to crumble if I'm honest."
A Just Eat spokesperson said: “We take the safeguarding of restaurant accounts on the Just Eat platform extremely seriously and we are currently investigating what happened in this restaurant's case.
"We continually review our security measures and always advise restaurant partners to be vigilant about their online security and recommend that they use unique passwords for different online platforms."
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