A poor Aussie has taken to Reddit to warn others of an “extremely sophisticated” scam call they received that featured lifelike AI voices and believable phone numbers, which almost would have seen them lose everything. Watch out for scam calls people!
In a post made to the r/Australia subreddit, user u/PhotographBusy6209 recounted to all who would listen their cautionary tale of a scam the almost-victim said “blew [their] mind”.
The Aussie’s recount shared that though they would never usually fall for any type of scam call, this one caught them off-guard right from the start due to it coming from a Melbourne landline phone number.
“I was called by a person with a British Aus accent claimed to be from my bank and who knew my full name and said that there had been some charges from Singapore,” the user began.
“He gave a number to call back on which had all the voice recordings of my actual bank and even the buttons to press to gain access to the crime branch.”
Beware: I experienced an extremely sophisticated phone scam that blew my mind
byu/PhotographBusy6209 inaustralia
The user then pointed out that their decision to call the second number was a “big mistake” on their behalf, as they should have just called their bank.
Although, had they not made this mistake, then none of us would be able to learn from it. So maybe there’s good to come from it!
Upon calling the second number, the user explained that they then spoke to another mane with a “sophisticated Aussie accent” who said they will need to follow a few instructions to “strengthen” their account.
The next step is where the Reddit user says their mind was blown by the convincing nature of the con.
“They sent me a code on my bank’s actual SMS. So I had previous legitimate messages from my bank on the same number,” they wrote.
The user believed here that their bank’s own SMS system had been hacked. However, as other Redditors explained, there is a simpler reason.
The actual explanation was that the orchestrators behind the scam call had attempted to login to the user’s bank account, and then made a request to change the password. This means the bank sent a two-factor authentication text to the user, which the hackers on the other wise of the phone would have used to create a new password and take all the funds from the victim’s account.
At this point, the Aussie shared they almost thought the call was legitimate, due to the texts from their bank. However they still felt something fishy was going on.
“I told them I wasn’t comfortable doing this and I was a few minutes away from my bank so I’ll just walk down,” they wrote.
“This is when he started getting really intense and desperate, and [said] the fraudsters were very close to moving my money out of my account.”
But when the user requested that the scam caller sent them a message using their banking app’s in-built messaging system, they couldn’t satisfy their requests. Additionally, they could see a new account was being set up through a different bank.
“It didn’t make sense. I put them on hold and called the legit bank number and asked them to check if there were any cases of fraud in my account,” the Reddit user said.
The user then found that there has been similar phishing scams identified where AI was used to generate the “sophisticated” accents.
“In hindsight there were so many red flags but you kind of overlook some of them. Even though I was very cautious, I could have been susceptible. So Just beware,” they warned.
In April it was reported by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) that Australians had been victim to over $2.74 billion in losses from scams in 2023.
Anyone who has fallen victim to a scam, or sees one operating, is advised to contact Scamwatch here and report it.
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