What you should NEVER do with these emails Bingo! Your identity has just been stolen and now there’s every chance your credit card will be used for fraud. The scammers are hoping you’ll ring that number to cancel the order, at which point they will probably ask for personal details such as your name, address and credit card number “for security reasons”. That’s not a genuine Amazon line - if you Google the telephone number, you’ll find others reporting it’s a fraud. That’s where the telephone number comes into play. The scammers are hoping you’ll spring into action to cancel the order. The goal of the email is to instill panic - someone’s ordered an expensive iPhone on your account and they’re having it delivered to a different address. In this case, the order confirmation was for a new iPhone. Why bother sending these emails, you may wonder? What are they hoping to achieve? All of these signs combined are confirmation that this email is not genuine. It has no street name, for starters.Įlsewhere in the email there are typos that Amazon wouldn’t let slip through. The address the package is supposed to be sent to is clearly wrong. The “Call our Toll-Free” line just cuts off, for example, and then rolls into another line prompting you to call a number (we’ll come back to that shortly). They urge people to tell vulnerable or elderly family members to be on the lookout for such scams.In the email above, for example, there are clear errors that genuine Amazon emails wouldn’t make. Nobody from the police was available to be interviewed but a spokesperson said they are aware of an increase in this sort of crime. Work was underway now to establish exactly how much these scams were costing the country but it ran in to the hundreds of thousands of dollars, he said. Mr Pope said most of the fraud was committed by people operating from offshore, making successful prosecutions very difficult. It's very easy in the electronic age just to assume it's coming from business ABC, I've already got some outstanding money owing to them, I'll just push the button. "Just pause and think about this before you act. Rob Pope said the single best defence against invoice fraud was to phone the business and double-check the request to use a different bank account had actually come from them, and not a fraudster. The fear is just that you know that stigma that comes with having to admit that you might have done something that wasn't quite, you know, what you'd normally do." "We often hear customers being quite shy about coming forward. The less tech savvy including the elderly were often an easy target for fraudsters. "If you're the victim of an invoice fraud and it is a large sum of money, then you've potentially got challenges around making your own mortgage payments and bill payments and things like that. The financial impact on people of being defrauded of often quite large sums of money, could be profound. But each bank will investigate and work through our process with the customer and the victims of the fraud to understand the circumstances in which the transaction was made."īecause the invoice had come from a trusted email address and used a legitimate letterhead, people were far more likely to trust it, she said. "Ultimately the liability sits with the customer because they have authorised the payment to go through. Ms Ryan said there was no guarantee the bank or the hacked business would refund the victim their money. Tradespeople who sent invoices via email were also a popular target. Scammers accessed the email accounts of law firms and waited until just before the settlement date to send an email, looking like it has come from the lawyer, asking for the purchaser to put the money for the home into the fraudster's account. Westpac's head of financial crime, Tiffany Ryan, said first home buyers were a common target. So it is a question of having a qualified trust now." Within business transactions people put a lot of trust in email and electronic invoicing these days, so they are used in day to day operations. He said the reason the scam often fooled people was the fact it was so plausible. Last year globally the FBI experienced double the number of cases compared to 2017.įormer deputy police commissioner, Rob Pope, was now working with the government's online fraud agency, Cert NZ. The crime was now the third most common form of online lawbreaking in this country behind phishing and ransomware. The scammer would then send their own email to the customer, from the business' email address, informing them its bank account number had changed and asking them to instead put the money into the fraudster's account. Known as invoice fraud, the crime involved fraudsters monitoring a business' emails, waiting for it to send an invoice to a customer for a large amount of money.
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