Albany, WA, teenager Aurora Casilli lost her savings in a National Australia Bank scam

A working teen who balanced three jobs to save for her dream home has lost her life savings after falling victim to a sophisticated phone scam.

Aurora Casilli, 18, has been saving every penny she can since landing her first job four years ago at her home in Albany, on the south coast of Western Australia.

But all of her hard work went down the drain in early December when she received a text message warning her that someone was trying to access her bank account.

The text appeared to come from his National Australia Bank and appeared in the same chat as the legitimate messages above.

Aurora Casilli (above) lost her life savings to a sophisticated “phishing” phone scam in December

Ms Casilli realized she had been scammed after transferring her money from an NAB account to a Commonwealth Bank account

The terrifying technique is known as “spoofing” and is used by scammers who change your caller ID number to appear to be the genuine companies.

Panicking that she was going to lose her savings, Ms. Casilli quickly called the toll-free number listed in the text message.

‘If it was from a random mobile number, I wouldn’t have believed it. But it seemed so real,” she said. news.com.au.

Ms Casilli said she was put on hold for an hour before she was finally able to reach the number, adding to the apparent authenticity of the scam.

The scammer posed as a NAB worker and told Ms. Casilli that an unknown person had accessed her account and told her to transfer her funds to a new account he had created for her.

The 18-year-old fully believed the man’s words and transferred her entire life savings of $36,561 to the new account.

Ms Casilli (left) says both NAB and Commonwealth Bank said they cannot help her get her money back

Only after hanging up did he realize his money had been transferred to a Commonwealth bank account.

“I felt sick, I just had this feeling that something was terribly wrong,” she said.

She tried to call the number back, but the ‘NAB worker’ quickly hung up once she realized that Ms. Casilli had cracked her scam. Now, Ms. Casilli wants to share her story so others can avoid the heartbreak of having her life savings stolen. from them.

‘While my friends were going out and buying cute things like makeup and clothes, I was saving. I was saving for my future,” she said.

‘Now I have nothing. I have to start all over again.

Both NAB and Commonwealth Bank have told Casilli that they cannot get her money back because she authorized the transfer.

NAB has reminded customers to call the bank’s official phone number if they receive a call request, even if it appears to be from a trusted number.