Cyber criminals spent months befriending a trusting pensioner and then syphoned more than $1 million from her bank accounts – one of the biggest frauds of its kind in New Zealand this year.
The massive theft was discovered when the 70-year-old victim, who lives alone in Christchurch, went to buy Chinese takeaways and her bank card was declined. When she got home and checked her accounts, she discovered her life savings were gone.
The woman had been so convinced by the scam that when the bank suspended her accounts and alerted her to two suspicious transactions totalling nearly $40,000 she told them not to worry, as she was investing money in cryptocurrency.
Over the next four months, the fraudsters continued to drain her accounts, ultimately taking $1.2m – money she will likely never recover.
READ MORE:
* Customer who lost $200,000 in investment scam fails in bid to get bank to pay
* Bank agrees to refund $11k to scam victim despite warning him ‘girlfriend’ might be fake
* Bank could not stop woman sending $30,000 to fake boyfriend
“I was devastated,” the woman said. “I should have known better.”
The elaborate fraud comes amid a wave of cyber crime, which has seen record numbers of Kiwis losing increasingly large sums of money to scams.
The Christchurch woman said that earlier this year she received a call on her cellphone from a young, smooth-talking man. Speaking with a Canadian accent, he identified himself as David and said he worked for Spark, a company…
