An Ottawa senior is out thousands of dollars after she fell victim to a telephone banking scam.
It took just one phone call for Maureen Maguss to lose $15,000 last fall.
“I worked a long time to give myself some comfortable living,” Maguss tells CTV News Ottawa.
She says she’s the victim of a telephone banking scam, which all started because of a phone call.
In October, she returned a voice message left on her landline phone. Maguss believed it was legitimate over fraudulent activity on her Visa line of credit.
“That there was some fraud on my card for about $1,300 for a purse, that I would never spend,” she says.
Maguss recently travelled to the United States to visit a friend, so when the person on the other end of the phone asked if she had travelled anywhere, it made the call seem even more legitimate.
The caller seemed to know some details about Maguss, and asked to verify the rest.
“It’s the bank. They knew my mother’s maiden name, they knew a certain amount of numbers, they knew part of my social insurance number, all these things which made sense to me.”
However, it wasn’t the bank that called her.
“Turns out it wasn’t. It was a fraudster,” she says.
Maguss says the fraudsters then had her enter a code and phone number on her landline – possibly forwarding her incoming calls to the scammers, including ones from her actual bank.
When she realized the next day that something just did not feel…
