Ace Morisey Coburn was going through one of the most “disturbing” times of his life when he lost his father, but things took a turn for the worse when he discovered that “cowardly” con artists had stolen thousands of dollars meant to pay for his father’s funeral.
The 33-year-old said the scam nearly caused vendors to walk out of the funeral because they accused the family of not paying their bills.
Two bills worth more than $7,000 for the venue, electronics, speaker system, lighting and catering were sent to his father’s email address and were paid by the family late last year.
But the family was unaware that the emails had been intercepted by the scammers, swapping the account numbers on the bills for their bank details, before the email from the original sender arrived.
“For months it went back and forth and (vendors) would get very angry and we didn’t understand why. We sent them the bill that we received and showed them that we had paid and they were trying to find out what had happened but nobody noticed,” he told news.com.au.
“We paid the $7,000 to the scammers and didn’t get it back and had to return the $7,000 to the sellers.”
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‘Panic sets in’
The fact that the scammers headed to his father’s funeral was “the lowest form of the low” and “the most cowardly way to steal,” he said.
“Obviously it was a mix of heartbreak, frustration and you lose a little bit of faith in humanity. I think at the time, given everything that’s happened in the last few years, we were in our emotional bandwidth,” she said.
“We were exhausted. It was obviously upsetting for mom, panic sets in and it’s a mix of every negative emotion you can think of.”
But the family’s painful experience did not end there.
While the funeral bills were intercepted in November, Mr. Morisey Coburn only discovered the scam in April of this year when the family lost another $5,000 after paying a bill for renovations.
The Sydneysider re-examined the bill and found a misspelled word “number” when it came to the account details.
“I didn’t know it was possible for someone to intercept the email details and safely return them from the original sender,” he said.
“It was not intercepted or forwarded from a fake email address, it was still from the builder.”
Less than 72 hours after discovering the scam, he went to the bank with his mother to report it, but was frustrated that the money could not be recovered despite marking the transaction shortly after the money was sent.
‘I lost a lot of confidence’
The business development manager said the fact that his mother was swindled out of thousands more after the funeral incident left him with a “little bit of guilt,” he said.
“I should have realized that earlier. If I realized that after the first instance, maybe it wouldn’t have happened again,” she said.
“I felt responsible. I taught mom how to open bills and how to pay, and when she said the funeral hadn’t taken place, I thought it was the wrong number, not that we were being scammed.”
She added that losing a total of $12,000 would have been “absolutely crippling” for many people and her mother was forced to use part of her father’s inheritance to cover the losses.
The whole experience had also left her 69-year-old mother “in shock”, she said.
“She was grieving the loss of her life partner… and has lost a lot of confidence. In the last few months, she goes to the bank and pays the bills and calls to check the account details or she gets a paper bill,” she said.
“She doesn’t trust online banking anymore, she doesn’t trust email billing and it definitely baffled her. She was rubbing salt on the wound. She was already trying to process what happened on a personal level.
“In the last few months, she has lost 12kg and she was never a big woman and she has not been feeling well and there has been a lot of stress. The scam definitely played a role and she has been battling stress and anxiety.”
The family was lucky to discover the scam when they did, as subsequent bills from the builder reached $20,000, he said.
swindler
A quarter of Australians encounter scams on a weekly basis, according to research commissioned by digital security provider Avast.
It revealed that three-quarters of Australians experienced an increase in scam attempts in the last 12 months and one in five were targeted by scammers at least once a day.
Three in five Australians are confident they wouldn’t fall for a scam, but Australians reported more than $336 million lost to scams in 2022, compared to $323.7 million in all of 2021, which was already a staggering 84 percent increase. cent in 2020.
“We are in the middle of a scam, and there is a clear disconnect between Australians’ perceived confidence in the ability to spot a scam and the increasing amount of money being lost each year to scams,” said Stephen Kho, a cyber security expert. by Avast.
“In reality, this is being further fueled by our own fear of embarrassment, with half of Australians admitting they would feel embarrassed if they fell for a scam despite the prevalence and sophistication of some of these scams, as Scammers are getting more cunning with their tools and scams are becoming more and more targeted at people’s situations.”
Online scams get more sophisticated
The research also showed that nearly nine in 10 respondents agreed that online scams are becoming much more sophisticated and 44 percent believe that scams are becoming more personal and targeted.
For Mr. Morisey Coburn, he advises others who receive significant invoices in their email to do their due diligence, such as calling the sender to confirm the details.
“Double check the invoices and even if it comes by email, don’t trust it (because) it doesn’t mean it hasn’t been tampered with,” he said.
“Don’t be complacent, don’t think that if you get scammed, the bank will take it back, as in many cases they won’t.”
Due to difficulties recovering the money after it was given to “bad actors,” Kho said that Avast created the Scamdemic Center to help educate people.
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