Close call over phone scammer

A Motueka business owner has been left feeling violated after a phone scammer nearly got away with $12,000 of her and her husband’s life savings.

This follows a warning from police last week after three elderly residents in the Tasman district were scammed out of $120,000 through phone scams.

Shirley McGuire said she wanted to warn others not to unwittingly ‘‘open the door’’ to those who called and pretended to be from legitimate companies.

‘‘They use trusted names,’’ McGuire said after a person claiming to work for Spark called her Greenworld Health & Lifestyle store on Wednesday, under the guise of addressing a faulty modem.

McGuire said she and her husband, Mike, had just bought a new Spark modem and had been having difficulties with internet dropping in and out, so the call seemed legitimate. The man used the ‘‘right technical language’’ which reassured her further.

He told her a technician would replace some equipment the next day, and gave a false name, Spark staff ID number, and appointment time. The phone scammer ran a diagnostic programme after McGuire had given him remote access through Teamviewer software. It seemed to fix errors and alerts.

‘‘Other professionals who have come and done work on my computer have used Teamviewer so I didn’t think anything of that,’’ she said. The man told her the computer and router were faulty and she was owed $900 by Spark, and he would transfer the money into her bank account.

He then told her to log into her internet banking to check the money had gone in.

Because the Teamviewer software was still running, the scammer was able to access to her details.

When $9000 appeared in the account both McGuire and her husband became suspicious. She said the man tried to assure her it had been a mistake and they needed to give him back the money, but her husband didn’t buy it.

The couple hung up, rang their bank and got the ANZ account closed. ‘‘What we didn’t realise is [the scammers] had just transferred the $9000 from our credit account,’’ she said. ANZ closed the account just minutes before the scammers completed a $12,000 withdrawal.

McGuire said it had been an emotional couple of days. ‘‘I just keep thinking about my responsibility in it. It really does affect you because you think ‘I opened the door that let them in’.’’ ANZ spokesperson Stefan Herrick said there had been three reported scam attempts in Motueka and Richmond in the space of two hours on Wednesday afternoon.