A racing driver has been cheated out of $50,000 in a cruel and elaborate scam.
Veronica McCann, 40, from Perth, lost her money when scammers hacked her Telstra account by posing as a victim of domestic violence.
By using their position in Telstra, the scammers were able to change all of her contact details to their own, completely cutting her off from all of her communications and bank accounts.
Mrs McCann said her first sign that something was wrong was when she came home from a meeting and lost reception on her phone.
The only evidence she had was an email from Telstra saying the phone number associated with her account had changed.
“I literally thought it was a mobile phone problem. I didn’t realise there was anything more sinister going on,” Mrs McCann said. Nine news on Thursday.
She later discovered that the scammers had disconnected her and switched her phone number to theirs, exploiting a little-known security vulnerability.
They posed as victims of domestic violence who had fled without a phone.
Veronica McCann (pictured) lost $50,000 from her ANZ bank account after scammers hacked her Telstra account
Fortunately, Mrs McCann was able to go to a Telstra store and retrieve her number and account, but when her phone was reconnected there was more bad news.
Her screen was immediately filled with notifications from MyGov, PayPal and, worst of all, ANZ.
The scammers had used personal information they found on Ms McCann’s Telstra account to empty her account within two hours.
“Palpitation, nausea the rest of the day, physical nausea,” she said.
“I called my husband and said, ‘You need to call ANZ and tell them to close our accounts because we’ve been hacked.’ From that moment on I felt horrible and awful.”
Ms McCann is still waiting for details of how the criminals were able to log into several of her accounts and change their details without ANZ or Telstra raising the alarm.
“That should have been a warning sign,” she said.
The scammers who targeted Ms McCann (pictured) posed as a domestic abuse victim who had lost his phone in order to hack into her account.
The only sign that Ms McCann had been hacked was an email from Telstra (pictured) warning that her contact details had been changed
ANZ has agreed to repay Ms McCann the stolen money, but only after she first shared her story of loss on Perth radio station 6PR on Thursday.
“You never know these days if it’s a scam,” she told the program.
The bank told Nine News the scam was “appalling” and assured customers it was “continuously evaluating and adjusting its options” as new scams emerge.
Telstra said “the scammer was able to answer the telecom company’s security questions” because it appeared they had committed identity fraud “before any interaction with Telstra”.
According to the ACCC, Australians reported more than 601,000 scams to authorities last year, an increase of 18.5 percent compared to 2022.