A Sydney businessman was scammed out of $130,000 after receiving what he thought was a legitimate text message last month, from what appeared to be the same phone number with which his bank had previously contacted him.
The text told Paul Trefry ANZ would be calling and then when he got the call he was informed by somebody he thought was from ANZ that his business account had been compromised, and he needed to transfer his money into a new account that would be safer.
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Over the next four days, Trefry, who is the director of a Sydney-based model and animatronics company, made seven withdrawals from the account, totalling $130,000.
While Trefry believed he was speaking to legitimate ANZ representatives during the entire ordeal, he had actually transferred the money into an account run by hackers.
Shortly after, on Mother’s Day, he was contacted by ANZ’s actual scam assist team who queried a withdrawal of more than $17,000.
“I told them, ‘look, I’m just following instructions from you guys because my business account had been compromised’,” Trefry told Sunrise.
“They then said ‘look, we’d never tell you to transfer money into another account’.”
When Trefry informed ANZ that he had been talking to someone with a British accent they told him he’d been targeted by “a very elaborate scam”.
“These guys know all of ANZ’s protocols and they’re using our text message service to contact people and to run the scam,” Trefry recalls ANZ telling him.
Trefry decided to confront the scammer he had been talking to on the phone and managed to record the crook boasting about what he had done.
The man taunted Trefry, telling him he was going to use his money to go on a holiday.
“It was great dealing with you Paul, thank you, I’m probably going to take a vacation very soon,” the scammer said.
“How do you feel about this situation?
“How do you feel about losing 33 per cent of your balance?”
The scammer told Trefry he had bought all of his personal information for only $20, including his BSB and account number.
ANZ’s scam assist team has managed to recoup some of the money Trefry lost, however he is still out of pocket $85,000.
Trefry said ANZ had a responsibility to warn its customers that its text message service had been compromised.
“I asked ANZ, ‘well you know that your text message service has been compromised, why don’t you send a text message out to all your customers through that same service warning people that scammers are using this service’ and they said ‘oh it’s something we’ll look into’.
“So while they’re procrastinating about looking into it, there’s people as we speak now being scammed out of their money.”
Shaq Johnson, ANZ head of customer protection told 7NEWS.com.au the incident was being looked into by the independent Australian Financial Complaints Authority.
“All scams are appalling, but this example particularly demonstrates the callousness of these sophisticated international criminal networks,” Johnson said.
“In this case, our customer was alerted to this scam by our customer protection teams after it was identified by our scam and fraud security settings.
“We successfully reversed one large payment, and recovered a significant sum from another financial institution that had received the funds. We continue to liaise with the other financial institution to see if the remaining funds can be recovered.”
Johnson said ANZ had warned its customers about the SMS scamming tactic on its website and banking app.
He also said that ANZ was “working to put in place measures to prevent criminals from adopting the ANZ label”.