As Safe As A Bank
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Note from the Editor:
This article was kindly written for the SDC by member Alan G.
An unfortunate ‘downside’ of living with an ever-increasing number of electronic gadgets, supposedly designed to make our lives easier, is the relative ease with which that same technology is used against us fraudulently to relieve us of our savings.
We’re all used to scams by now, whether in the emails we get or the bogus Amazon and Telstra phone calls based in Mumbai, but the one I want to alert you to is far more serious. It concerns banks and identity theft.
I really hope that by writing this, I may actually help somebody to protect themselves. We used to think that keeping your money in a bank was by far the best thing to do, but after my experience, I really wonder if I should just keep it in an old sock under the mattress!
I’m not certain, but the first indication of something being amiss was a text message we got from a health care appointment provider advising us that our Medicare card information had been compromised – but ‘not to worry, it’s only the information on the card, nothing more’. I didn’t act straight away, but after about a week, I decided to apply for a new Medicare card. No problem so far. That was about November last year.
In January this year, we decided to buy a new washing machine and, after a lot of research, ordered and paid for one from Harvey Norman using my P&N Bank card, which required a PIN number to be entered. (P&N bank is based in Western Australia). We stopped on the way home and used the card again – tap-and-go this time – for groceries. When we got home, I got a notification that there’d been a transfer of money into an account in my name of about $2000. I quickly checked up online and found another transfer of over $2000, and both these payments, as well as a number of smaller payments, had been progressively transferred from my account into an account under my name that I knew nothing about. In other words, our money had been taken from our everyday account and moved into a bogus account created by ‘somebody’ allowing money to be moved to this person’s account in another bank!
The culprit’s name shown on the bank statement was Kwun Yun, and our account had been cleaned out! Of course, I immediately rang the bank, and after being on hold (for what seemed like an eternity), my account was frozen, and the lengthy procedure of investigation began. They advised me that they would try to get some of the money back but couldn’t promise anything. I then contacted Westpac Bank, where I held a credit card account, to advise them that I’d had a problem with the P&N account, but they told me that nobody had touched my Westpac account at that time. Hindsight is a wonderful thing…
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Quisque in diam id erat facilisis consectetur vitae vel urna.
Ut lacus libero, suscipit auctor ipsum sit amet, viverra pretium nisl. Nullam facilisis nec odio nec dapibus. Integer maximus risus et velit porttitor ullamcorper
This article was kindly written for the SDC by member Alan G.
An unfortunate ‘downside’ of living with an ever-increasing number of electronic gadgets, supposedly designed to make our lives easier, is the relative ease with which that same technology is used against us fraudulently to relieve us of our savings.
We’re all used to scams by now, whether in the emails we get or the bogus Amazon and Telstra phone calls based in Mumbai, but the one I want to alert you to is far more serious. It concerns banks and identity theft.
I really hope that by writing this, I may actually help somebody to protect themselves. We used to think that keeping your money in a bank was by far the best thing to do, but after my experience, I really wonder if I should just keep it in an old sock under the mattress!
I’m not certain, but the first indication of something being amiss was a text message we got from a health care appointment provider advising us that our Medicare card information had been compromised – but ‘not to worry, it’s only the information on the card, nothing more’. I didn’t act straight away, but after about a week, I decided to apply for a new Medicare card. No problem so far. That was about November last year.
In January this year, we decided to buy a new washing machine and, after a lot of research, ordered and paid for one from Harvey Norman using my P&N Bank card, which required a PIN number to be entered. (P&N bank is based in Western Australia). We stopped on the way home and used the card again – tap-and-go this time – for groceries. When we got home, I got a notification that there’d been a transfer of money into an account in my name of about $2000. I quickly checked up online and found another transfer of over $2000, and both these payments, as well as a number of smaller payments, had been progressively transferred from my account into an account under my name that I knew nothing about. In other words, our money had been taken from our everyday account and moved into a bogus account created by ‘somebody’ allowing money to be moved to this person’s account in another bank!
The culprit’s name shown on the bank statement was Kwun Yun, and our account had been cleaned out! Of course, I immediately rang the bank, and after being on hold (for what seemed like an eternity), my account was frozen, and the lengthy procedure of investigation began. They advised me that they would try to get some of the money back but couldn’t promise anything. I then contacted Westpac Bank, where I held a credit card account, to advise them that I’d had a problem with the P&N account, but they told me that nobody had touched my Westpac account at that time. Hindsight is a wonderful thing…
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Quisque in diam id erat facilisis consectetur vitae vel urna.
Ut lacus libero, suscipit auctor ipsum sit amet, viverra pretium nisl. Nullam facilisis nec odio nec dapibus. Integer maximus risus et velit porttitor ullamcorper
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