Have you ever met anyone who’s been scammed out of money?

[UhOhhhhh]

I’m currently watching Love Rats on Netflix which I know is an old documentary. It’s made me wonder just how many people have been scammed (or close to being scammed) in their lives before. The fact that some of the victims have had £10K, £40K and even £120K taken from them by scammers is crazy!!

Have you ever known anyone that’s been scammed? I luckily don’t think I have

One thing I was told, never have your banking app PIN the same as the unlock PIN on your phone. Possible that someone watches you unlock your phone then takes the phone “ to put in their number”

Our neighbour (as in my pp) was warned not to tell any friends or family, since ‘they’ll only be jealous and try to stop you getting the money’ (‘lottery’ scam).

These people are so cruel when they work on people they know are nice and biddable.

People in general need to work on their inner bitch... if my bank told me this I'd say 'Well you deal with it then... I'm not sorting out your issue. Your motivation for doing it well is not having to find the balance of my account from somewhere else.'

That said, I have had a few moments when I've had to check myself. Some scams are so sophisticated.

In DH's previous job the CEO was scammed out of a massive amount of money, fake phone call from the supposed ead of Accounts or whoever. She lost her job because of it.

Transferred around £150k I think

Keeping this as vague as possible so as not to be identifying to people involved/relatives of the person.

A woman I knew had recently got divorced and had a large sum of money through the sale of their property. Went on holiday to an African country and 'fell in love'. She was in her 60s, he was significantly younger. She bought property out there, shortly afterwards married him and moved there.

A little while after the marriage she died in an 'accident' and no money was ever seen by the family members as presumably the husband of a few months had it all.

Devastating for the family, they could never prove any foul play. Perhaps there wasn't any but the circumstances were highly suspicious.

With the last one, how did he manage to set up all the details required for payment to a new bank account in the time you'd expect it to take for someone to input a phone number? That's pretty quick work! Oh, and was there not a PIN on the banking app?

My student son had his phone stolen in London a couple of weeks ago. In the 30mins it took him to get to a police station to report it thetheives managed to unlock his phone, access all his cards, transfer money from his bank account, use Apple Pay to buy clothes and shoes, changed his email address and access all his passwords.

The phone was locked and had facial recognition, all his passwords were completely different and he had 2 step verification. It's taken 2 weeks to rectify and recover everything. Never underestimate the skills of these scammers

Yes, this relative, and I have name changed as I don’t want this linked to my main account. The scammer had his sentence commuted by Trump. https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/family-duped-for-millions-in-scam/2FO7TYHDEP3MSSICLUM7FEYGZY/

My BIL's mum was scammed out of $5000 by someone pretending to be from a telecommunications company. She's normally pretty savvy, but she had just had her internet connection upgraded which made her think it was legitimate, so the timing was perfect from the scammers' point of view.

A friend's step-father left his wife (friend's mum) for some Facebook romance scammer.

I was scammed out of an item I had paid 500 for.
It was gone; the business closed and building empty when I went to collect it a week after purchase.

I know someone who lost £5k booking a fake holiday villa online. Don't know if they got anything back.
This was someone with a fairly senior IT role, which goes to show its not just the technophobe grannies and grandpas that can fall victim.

I got a 'mum I lost my phone' text, and was so lucky that ds and I happen to use an unusual sign-off to our texts, so i knew it wasn't him. Wasn't deliberate to set it up but it saved me!

My Dad lost nearly £100k, not even all his money - he borrowed from banks and family. It took a long time for us to find out and it was very hard to convince him he was being scammed.

My brother’s FIL fell for the one where his “son” texted saying he’d lost his phone.

I think the banks could do a lot more to protect old people from scammers. Transferring large amounts of cash should require a bank visit and chat with a manager

Woman I used to work with got scammed by an online Indian fake romance scam. To the tune of 10's of thousands of ££. Took out loans etc to send to a man she'd never met. She only found out cause police told her.

I had the opposite: what looked like a really obvious scam about 'your parcel'. Later that day, a delivery person arrived with a small item that I'd completely forgotten that I'd ordered!

It doesn't help that a lot of companies seem to have a 'chain' of parties who are involved in getting your parcel to you - so the logo on the delivery person's badge/jacket and van bears no resemblance at all to the company you ordered from or any familiar delivery company.

I fell for a Joules closing down sale and happily put £160 worth of bits in my basket , checked out and waited patiently

Week later whilst looking to see if I could track the delivery I saw the email confirmation was something like " [email protected]" I realised I'd been fooled , when I went into the bank to ask if I should order a new card just in case , they opened a dispute , new card on phone immediately and refunded within 24 hrs , I was really impressed and much more vigilant since .

I also have a work colleague who took 4 years and over £30,000 getting rid of her very young Tunisian husband . That's a whole other story.

Yes!! I know several older men who send money to women they’ve met online who are in ‘distress’.. we’re talking thousands of pounds sent.. it’s mad and it’s rife imo..

My grandad got a text a couple of years ago saying he needed to log on to the NHS app and pay for his certificate to prove he had been vaccinated against covid for 99p..
He logged on and paid the 99p and had his bank cleared out at the same time.

A friend got conned out of thousands buying into crypto. He’d been told his return would double so despite my husband telling him it was clear bs, he put in £2500, then when that wasn’t enough secretly put in another £10,000.

Him and his wife also fell for the sales pitch with the foam loft insulation (bad emotion it’s own) where they were told by a guy that randomly showed up he had one final discount he could give out and he still had other houses to go to. She was telling me about it gleefully and it took a bit of convincing to make them believe they weren’t getting a deal. We made them cancel it.

some people are just susceptible to believe people I guess.

Yes we did sadly by a landscaper. He was advertising his services on Facebook (10 years ago now). He gave us a quote then said he needed £2k upfront for materials. He did some work ordered a couple of fence panels. Then left the job after about 2 days never to be seen. We were devastated as we'd just had building work done and the garden was a mess.

I saw on Facebook later he was also pretending to be a teacher/or tutor type of person.

A good (elderly) friend who's husband had just died got caught in a property related one and she didn't even do anything wrong!

The house was listed to sell, someone took the pictures from right-move and created a gumtree ad to rent the house out. It was mid covid so I guess tours were less common, but a whole family turned up with a moving van from the other side of the country, thinking they were perfectly legally renting the house and had already paid thousands in advance rent/deposit etc. Obviously the police were called and my friend was hauled over the coals as it was assumed she was part of the scam initially.

My colleague was very nearly caught by a scam - she did the account books for a friend. 'HMRC' phoned to tell her that £3k was owing for VAT by the friend, it needed to be paid right now or else.

She panicked and was rushing round trying to sort the payment until another colleague said 'that sounds like a scam'.

My colleague was nobody's fool but anyone can fall for a scam if it catches your Achilles heel.

When we moved house we kept getting letters from the solicitor warning we were at high risk of fraud due to the amounts being transferred. Basically they said that hackers can have hacked your email account but don’t do anything yet, just watch for an opportunity involving large sums. They then intercept say an email with an invoice attachment, change the payment details on the invoice to their own then let the email land in your inbox and you end up paying the scammers. They also wait for the day you’re exchanging and send an email pretending to be from the solicitor saying you need to pay this much today.
if you ever get an email saying someone’s bank details have changed, always ring them and speak to them in person to confirm.

Someone I know fell for the COL payments text scam.
Someone else lost £150K to the email that sell you shares in whisky.
A couple people feel for some other scam and lost a couple thousand and someone else had the ‘bank’ call, they tried to call the bank to confirm but the scammers stayed connected. They lost £5k.
No one got the money back and they are all people that aren’t vulnerable and that I would never have believed would have fallen for this.