“Everybody knows someone who has either been scammed or attempted to be scammed.”
It’s been a merciless lesson for one in all Australia’s high racehorse trainers, Rob Heathcote, who has spoken publicly as a warning to different Australians after he was scammed out of $100,000 making an attempt to purchase a Mercedes-Benz for his spouse.
He paid a deposit in December 2021 and was instructed that there can be delays getting the automotive.
Emails have been despatched forwards and backwards for some months.
“It was at that time that we ceased to communicate via phone and it was pretty much exclusively done via email,” he mentioned.
“Sometime during that period, we don’t know exactly when, a hacker, a scammer intercepted emails from Mercedes-Benz to me, and ultimately from myself to Mercedes-Benz, and then started to play each of us other against each other, in an attempt to create the illusion that I was actually talking to Mercedes-Benz.”
It’s a rip-off often known as business e-mail compromise, a sort of phishing assault.
AFP Commander Cybercrime Operations Chris Goldsmid defined on the podcast that, sadly, it is the kind of rip-off that’s turning into more and more widespread in Australia.
“One of the scam types that we are really focused on is business email compromise, and that’s a particularly nefarious type of scam where criminals will compromise an email account and then use that email account to send legitimate-looking to try and trick people into sending payments to the wrong account,” he mentioned.
“It’s a extremely widespread sort of rip-off in Australia.
“So it is inflicting vital loss, with the common price per incident of $50,000.”
