Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Hacking con that crooks bank on
Matthew Wright among those stung by cash-transfer scam
TV and Talk Radio presenter Matthew Wright has told how he fell “hook, line and sinker” for crooks who hacked into the email account of builders working on his house.
The fraudsters changed just one letter in the email address of the genuine building firm to trick him into sending £10,000 to their bogus account.
A Mirror reader from Reading, Berks, has also described how she lost even more money to this sophisticated fraud.
The single mum had remortgaged her home to build an extension costing £81,000, and wasn’t surprised to be asked for a deposit of £20,550 by bank transfer.
A second email requested another £10,200, supposedly this time as a direct payment to the builders’ merchants.
But, just as in Matthew Wright’s case, the builder’s email account had been hacked and crooks pocketed both payments.
“The hackers were so professional – they knew the entire background to my project and the builder’s style of writing,” said the poor woman, who prefers not to be named.
“They had managed to attach the entire previous correspondence to their ongoing ‘fake’ emails.
“They kept up dialogue with me about the building work, so I had no reason to suspect anything.
“As well as hacking my builder’s email account, they set up a fake account in my name to email him back so that he did not get suspicious.”
This is called push-payment fraud, where the victim willingly transfers money without knowing that it is going into the wrong account.
Last year, bank customers transferred nearly £240million to fraudsters and only a quarter was refunded.
Currently banks check only the sort code and account number when transfers are made, so crooks can put any name on an account, even copying the names of genuine account holders – like a firm of builders. The poor mum from Reading feels that fraud victims like her need more support.
“There is little help for people in my situation,” she said.
“I called my bank, First Direct, as soon as I found out but their fraud department was closed as it was after 6pm.
“I rang the next morning and they said that they had five working days in which to even notify the beneficiary banks to try to get the accounts frozen but, because of the large sums involved, they would expedite this.
“As I had made one of the payments only four hours prior to notifying my bank, every second counted.
“Not once have my bank called me with any update.”
She was even more scathing about Action Fraud.
“They said it will take up to three months to hear back as to how they have progressed it and they would not speak to me if I call for an update during those three months.
“I tried ringing my local police station but was told they would not talk to me and it had to go through Action Fraud.
“The result of all of this is that my two years of planning applications and architect’s costs are likely to be for nothing and the dream of trying to make a better life for myself and my two small sons is shattered.”
Last month, the Financial Ombudsman Service told banks to be more sympathetic to fraud victims.
“It’s not fair to automatically call a customer grossly negligent simply because they’ve fallen for a scam,” said Caroline Wayman, chief ombudsman.
“We often remind banks that they need to support what they’re saying with facts. And if they can’t do that, it’s likely we’ll tell them to cover the money their customer has lost.”
Action Fraud said it does not itself have investigative powers but forwards crime reports to the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau for “investigation, disruption and prevention purposes”.
First Direct have yet to respond.