As our lives become more and more digital, online scams are getting more frequent and sophisticated. We spoke to victims of three common scams to learn what to look out for.
This content was created in paid partnership with Kiwibank. The names of the people who shared their stories have been changed.
Michael classifies himself as digitally savvy and security conscious. He’s on his computer and phone at work and at home, but he doesn’t save his credit card number or passwords online and he’s careful to protect his pin number from prying eyes. But that wasn’t enough to protect him from becoming the victim of a spoofing scam, where someone pretending to work for Kiwibank tricked him into giving away information to help unfreeze his son’s bank account.
“I do all the right things, but he was just so convincing. Any doubts or questions I had, he had all the answers. They knew about my son, they knew his name, they knew my name, and they knew he was having trouble with his account. They used that parent’s concern for their kids and the desire to fix things for them to get the information out of me.”
And it’s easy to see how he fell for it: scammers are able to imitate legitimate call centre numbers (hence “spoof”) to look like it is the bank. The caller had a New Zealand accent and the script was very realistic. They sent codes to his phone from “Kiwibank” for him to verify.
Michael originally questioned the caller when they asked him for the access…
