So vulnerable after Mum’s death, I let them trick me out of £19,000
A SCHOOL librarian lost almost £19,000 to call centre scammers after being kept on the phone for five hours and repeatedly threatened with arrest.
Pauline Howe, 64, was targeted after the death of her mother, when she was at her most vulnerable – and much of the money stolen was from her inheritance.
Her nightmare began in October last year when she received a voice message from a woman calling herself Claire Williams, – who claimed to be from HMRC – saying it was urgent that she call the 0203 number back.
Mrs Howe immediately returned the call and spoke to a man, Michael Carter, who said HMRC had noticed a discrepancy of £5,000 on her account. He claimed she had violated HMRC’s code, caused wilful misrepresentation, theft by deception, tax fraud and tax evasion. He also said they had frozen her driving licence, passport and national insurance number and had a warrant out for her arrest.
She was told the breach had occurred between 2012 and 2016, but that if she paid the debt off immediately, nothing would happen to her.
Mrs Howe, who has been completing an online tax return since 2010 for a property that she rents, feared she had submitted her return incorrectly.
She said she would have to do it when she finished work and called the real HMRC on her landline when she returned home that afternoon at around 3.30pm. She was kept on hold, and while on the line, her mobile rang. Unbeknown to her, it was the fraudsters calling.
She hung up on the real HMRC, and took the call on her mobile. It was ‘Michael Carter’ on the line.
Mrs Howe said: ‘He could tell I was anxious and he spoke reassuringly to me, and said: “Don’t worry it will be okay”. He was very compassionate and whenever I had a question he would say: “You don’t need to worry about that”.’
She added: ‘I was told to go to the HRMC website on my laptop. They guided me through several pages on HMRC’s website, seeming really knowledgeable, and took me to a page that had a box in it which said ‘enter reference’.
‘They said that once I had paid, I would be given a reference and that would allow me to make an appointment with my local HMRC office.’
The fraudster told Mrs Howe to go to her online banking page and gave her a sort code and account number for a Prepaid Financial Services account into which she was told to transfer £1,900. She was told to put her own name into the payee box in capitals and said: ‘I felt secure knowing I was paying myself.’
The money left her account, but the fraudster insisted he hadn’t received it. She sent the transfer again, and was met with the same response. When she argued with him that the transfer was working he replied: ‘You are forgetting we have a warrant out for your arrest.’
She made five transfers totalling £9,981 from her Barclays account before the fraudster recommended she try another account reminding her: ‘You’ve committed fraud’. Mrs Howe began transferring money from her First Direct account.
The fraudster also asked her if there was anyone else she could ask for money, and she named her ex-husband.
She was told to call him on the landline while they were on the phone but not to say what the money was for.
She called, but explained to him that the money was for the HMRC who were going to arrest her. Her ex-husband told her to hang up, but in her confusion she hung up on him. The fraudster said: ‘Do you realise you’ve breached security. We told you not to tell him.’
Her ex-husband finally came around and ended the call at about 8pm, by which time she has lost £18,779.
While the transfers were being made, both banks sent Pauline messages querying the payments, but she authorised them to go through.
She said: ‘They caught me a really vulnerable time. My mum would have been 90 the day before they called. We had booked a family holiday because we didn’t want to be at home for Christmas after mum’s death, and when they said they would stop my passport I thought this would ruin our chances of get-ting away.’
Much of the money that was transferred was from the sale of her mother’s house which she was planning to move into a savings account.
First Direct initially said they would not refund the money because she had authorised the payment. But after being contacted by the Mail, the bank reviewed their investigation and have decided they did not act quickly enough in contacting the beneficiary bank. They have returned the whole amount of £8,798.
A Barclays spokesman said: ‘This scam is a tragic case of theft by a fraudster pretending to be acting on behalf of HMRC. Once Mrs Howe contacted us to report this scam, we acted quickly to contact the third party bank involved and recover the funds – however they confirmed that the accounts had been emptied.’
‘He could tell I was anxious’