Brown, who said he had done malware scans on his computer, signed off: “Don’t be a dummy like me, because I wouldn’t wish how I felt this evening on my worst enemy.”
Experts say if you’re in any doubt about an apparent communication from your bank - or any other service provider - you should phone it using a number sourced from its website, or that you’re otherwise confident is correct, not a number included in a text message.
But a key pain point with Brown’s experience was the time it took to make contact with Westpac.
Westpac NZ head of fraud Peter Barnes said: “We’re pleased to have resolved the matter for Mr Brown and his family without any loss of funds. He did exactly the right thing by contacting us once he realised he had been caught up in a scam, which gave us the best possible chance of recovering the funds.
“We continually invest in upgrading and developing new technologies to combat fraud and scams. In the past 12 months we have grown our fraud prevention team by 25 per cent. However, we do sometimes experience high call volumes and we’re sorry for any additional stress Mr Brown and his family experienced while waiting for a response.”
Brown told the Herald this morning, “The Westpac rep who made the call back was both effective and sympathetic and we had things locked down relatively quickly once she called. As she pointed out, ‘These aren’t short conversations’ and a lot of people seem to be needing them right now.”
He declined to comment on the sums involved.
Brown said one of the red flags he’d missed in his fluster was that the scammer’s message came from a regular cellphone number. Banks and other service providers typically send texts to customers from a four-digit short code.
Cert NZ says if you do get scammed, it’s imperative that you contact your bank as soon as possible to have the best chance of getting transactions reversed. You should also contact the Ministry of Justice-backed ID Care, which can help you freeze your credit reports and take other steps to limit the damage from identity theft.
Banks back awareness doco
On Wednesday, the Banking Ombudsman launched a new series, You’ve Been Scammed by Nigel Latta, soon to be broadcast on TV1 and TVNZ+.
The series, funded by the banking industry, “will help to expose how humans are genetically predisposed to fall for scams and it’s getting harder to spot them”, the Ombudsman’s office said this week.
At least 24,000 hit by bank scams
“In the 12 months to March, more than 24,000 New Zealanders reported to their bank they’d been caught up in a scam. Yet we know the actual number affected each year is far higher,” the Ombudsman’s office said.
“Many people feel ashamed, embarrassed or too scared to report their experiences so many more instances simply go unreported.”
In the four-part documentary series, psychologist Latta will educate viewers on eight scam types and eight human weaknesses that make all of us vulnerable to being socially engineered.
Spike in online scams
Cert NZ’s most recent quarterly report, for the three months to December, found direct financial losses from cyberscams had spiked 66 per cent to $5.8 million as 264 people lost between $100 and $1000, and 16 lost more than $100,000.
Rob Pope, Cert NZ’s director, acknowledges that sheepishness about being scammed likely means the figures are just the tip of the iceberg.
Australia’s big moves
Australia’s Budget 2023 had A$46.5 million ($76.34m) earmarked to establish a national coordinator for cyber security to oversee multi-agency efforts in the event of a cyber incident.
The Australian Budget also quadrupled the e-Safety Commissioner’s annual funding with a A$131m injection. The equivalent agency here, Netsafe, has a budget of around $4m.
There was A$86.5m to establish a new National Anti-Scam Centre, which will include establishing Australia’s first SMS Sender ID Registry to help prevent scammers from imitating trusted brand names (something we’re over-familiar with here, most recently with incessant “unpaid toll” scam texts).
Those moves were not matched on this side of the Tasman with our Budget 2023.
Chris Keall is an Auckland-based member of the Herald’s business team. He joined the Herald in 2018 and is technology editor and a senior business writer.
