Don’t let yourself be scammed

LEONGATHA resident Lynn Dormer was sitting at her computer and had just completed a Norton Virus scan which came back completely clean, when, all of a sudden, her screen was inundated with pop-up windows.

In the middle of it all, ‘Microsoft’ with a telephone number appeared. 

Calling the number a gentleman answered and told Lynn she had been hacked. He asked if she would like to help them catch the hacker. 

“I’m an 80-year-old woman and I’m sitting here in my dressing gown and pyjamas,” she said to the man.

He replied, “Do you want to help us do this or not? Because we’d like to involve you in this thing.”

Lynn agreed to help, telling the Sentinel–Times, “I’ve always been a bit of an adventurer.”

The man on the phone told Lynn to get dressed and go to Woolworths, which she did, all the while staying on the phone to the man.

“As I passed the Commonwealth Bank, I said, I’m just passing the Commonwealth Bank, let me just go in and make sure everything’s ok. He said, ‘No, no, no, they’re actually involved. Don’t do that because if you’re going to help us do this, you’ve got to understand that they’re involved’,” Lynn recounted.

Lynn proceeded to go past the bank and to Woolworths.

The man told Lynn, ‘We’re going to put $2000 in your credit account and we want you to go in and buy four $500 wish cards from Woollies’. Don’t worry, the money will go into your account.” 

At this point Lynn didn’t realise her computer had been hacked and full access to her bank account gained.

Before she had left her unit, the man had told her to download Anydisk, a remote desktop application that allows someone to connect to another computer from anywhere in the world through the internet. 

“If Woolies’ ask you why you’re buying four wish cards for $500, say they’re for your grandchildren,” the man told Lynn, and she proceeded successfully to buy the cards.

“He said, now what I want you to do before you do 
anything else, go and sit somewhere comfortable and read me off the names of the wish card, the numbers of the wish cards and the access codes,” recounts Lynn.

“I did what I was told,” she said. 

Then, still on the phone, the man asked Lynn if there was a Coles nearby, she told him there wasn’t but there was an IGA.

He said to her “OK, we’re getting them, but we need one more,” said Lynn. 

It was at this point that something twigged in Lynn.

“What twigged in me at that point was I wanted to talk to someone else, the loneliness of the situation made me… But I was afraid that if I spoke to anybody else, he’d hear me and I’d have failed.

“So I went over to IGA, they didn’t have any decent gift cards, so he said, now go back to Woolworths.”

He told Lynn to go and buy three Woolworths gift cards at $500 each. 

Lynn mentioned to the man that Leongatha Woolworths was small, implying that it may seem suspicious, but he told her to try anyway. 

“So I did that, and the interesting thing is that while I was doing that, someone from the desk up the way in Woolies’ came over and said, ‘Be careful because we think these cards are part of a scam.’”

At that point Lynn said she thought, “Am I catching the scammer or am I part of the scam?”

She went ahead with the sale, went outside and again read the card numbers to the man on the phone.

“He said, you did good in there. I could hear it all. You did good. We’re right on the trail of the crooks,” Lynn recounted. 

The man then told Lynn to go home and keep him on the line until she got there. Once there he told her to turn her computer and phone off until the morning and have a nap, and mentioned that she had his number if she was worried. 

The man had kept Lynn on the phone for a total of three hours. 

“I did exactly what he said. I lay on my bed and after about an hour, I thought Ok, I’m now suspicious. It took three hours.”

“I wanted to speak to him again. So, I went and called his number, and of course three calls through to this number and doink, doink, doink.”

There was no answer. 

Lynn decided to call her daughter who lives in Bendigo and works in finance and Artificial Intelligence.

“She said, you idiot mum, you’ve just been scammed.”

Lynn commented that she felt deeply ashamed, embarrassed and foolish when she realised what had happened. 

“They shouldn’t have been clever enough,” she said, and contributed part of the scammers success on her loneliness, being a relatively new resident of Leongatha Lynn is without many personal contacts. 

Lynn’s daughter advised her to go to the police, Centrelink and the Commonwealth Bank (CBA), all of which she did.

The bank were caring and sympathetic, and accompanied Lynn to Woolworths to tell them what happened; however, Woolworths were unable to help.

Lynn contacted the complaints department at the bank, who were initially unhelpful and unwilling to repay the amount taken from her accounts. 

However, her daughter informed Lynn, that she fulfils all the criteria for being vulnerable and that she needed to contact them again, which Lynn did.

CBA followed up with an email stating they couldn’t repay the money but offered her mental health support. 

On advice again from her daughter Lynn mentioned to that bank that she would take the matter to the Australian Financial Complaints Authority (AFCA) to get it resolved.

After some back and forth emails, over a number of weeks, the CBA eventually agreed to repay Lynn the full amount that had been scammed from her.

In a text message sent to the Sentinel-Times regarding the CBAs decision, Lynn wrote, “I am blown away but recognise that although they accept no blame, they have recognised and taken into account my age and vulnerability. They also added that if I wasn’t pleased with the handling of the complaint, I could, of course, go to AFCA. I replied that I was extremely grateful to them for helping to get past the experience.”

While Lynn felt deeply embarrassed about falling for the scam, she wanted to tell her story to help prevent it from happening to others.

“I just don’t want anybody else to be as foolish as I was,” she said.