An Australian small business owner has described the moment she realized her phone and bank accounts had been hacked by scammers who made off with $50,000.
The woman, who asked to be called Jenny, said she and her husband run a small healthcare business and first noticed something unusual on January 9 when she received a call from National Australia Bank.
NAB told her that they had detected suspicious activity on her account and would follow up, but within minutes of the call, both her and her husband’s phones went into SOS mode and could not be unlocked.
Jenny told 2GB’s Ben Fordham that she later discovered her numbers had been “ported” to devices owned by the scammers, allowing them to receive the two-factor authentication codes needed to access the accounts.
Jenny said over two days scammers targeted her NAB, St George, CBA and Paypal accounts and siphoned off $50,000 in total.
NAB told her that they had detected suspicious activity on her account and would follow up, but within minutes of the call, both her and her husband’s phones went into SOS mode and could not be unlocked.
“I’ve never heard of portability before and even some people, when you go to banks, say, ‘What is that?'” Jenny said Thursday.
‘If you have credit cards somewhere, they can open new cards and then they go crazy.
“We went to our company call center and they said, ‘Looks like something happened in Melbourne,’ and told us to call back at 2 o’clock on a pay phone.
“Well, I called again at 2pm to a pay phone, which by the way not all of them work, and as soon as I answered, he told me to get two $10 SIM cards from his nearest Telstra dealer and put them in his phones.
“We thought, ‘What’s going on?’
He said NAB was first alerted when someone posing as Jenny called the bank to ask to increase her credit limit so she could buy her daughter a car.
According to the ACCC, number porting scams are a growing threat involving scammers impersonating you to get your telco to change your number to a device you own.
Once this happens, they can use information like your name, address, or any passwords they hacked to make transfers or get credit on your accounts, which they quickly deplete.
Jenny told 2GB’s Ben Fordham that she later discovered her numbers had been “ported” to devices owned by the scammers, allowing them to receive the two-factor authentication codes needed to access the accounts.
“We have no idea how this transfer occurred,” Jenny said.
“It takes over your life, we’ve had to get new licenses, new passports, new Medicare cards, my Apple account disappeared and it takes me 30 to 40 days to get the money back.”
Jenny said her accounts had been placed on hold and she was trying to get the money back.
“St George stopped them at the door, they only gave them $50 because they came in immediately.”
He said the rest of the money is returned “in dribs and drabs.”
“NAB has been pretty good,” he said.
Between 2018 and 2019, Australians lost approximately $5.4 million to portability scams.
New rules introduced by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) in 2020 tightened controls around portability, reducing the impact of the scam, but the problem persists as scammers find clever ways to trick the user. system.
In 2021, the ACMA issued warnings to Telstra, Optus and Medion Mobile saying they needed more rigorous processes to verify identities before porting numbers.