Dani’s secret battle: A HACKER STOLE MY LIFE SAVINGS!
The expert cook opens up about the harrowing theft that left her homeless
Mother-of-two Dani Venn was nothing short of terrified when Masterchef producers called her and asked if she’d return to the show.
“It’s sort of like being asked to re-sit your high school exams!” jokes Dani. “I was so thrilled. As soon as they explained it to me, I was like, of course I’ll come back!” she says, adding that having friend Hayden Quinn by her side was a bonus.
“I feel like we’re going into this as a team actually – we know each other really well.”
Dani, 34, is certainly no stranger to putting up a fight to win. In 2018, she and husband Chris Burgess found themselves homeless and living in a caravan after hackers stole $250,000 from the proceeds of their sale of their Melbourne home while it was being settled on a new online conveyancing system called PEXA.
‘The money was just gone... I went into fight mode’
“The money was just gone, completely vanished,” tells Dani, who says the criminals were apparently able to bypass the system’s security measures.
“We were told from everyone involved that it wasn’t their fault and nobody could help us get [our money] back. It was all our savings.
“I went into fight mode, trying to figure out who owned the company and how this happened,” explains Dani, who used her media platform to fight the banks and big businesses that were refusing to give them their money back.
Eventually, Dani and Chris got their cash back and the company introduced new security measures and a customer guarantee that if your money was hacked, you would be able to get it back.
At the time, the PEXA CEO said in a statement, “It made sense to us to help Ms Venn and her family through this while her practitioner works through his insurance claim.”
Dani’s message to fans is to be careful online.
“Protect your identity online, make sure you have a virtual private network (VPN), which you can easily put on your computer for a few dollars a month,” says Dani.