**** BE AWARE VERY DETAILED FRAUD PHONE CALL....****

phebe3

This is just to warn people that there is a very clever fraud being done at the moment.  I don't want comments or criticism as it can happen to the best of us although am sure will get some
My partner , who is VERY money savvy and careful, very aware of fraud and very cautious, had a phone call from Nat W fraud dept the other day. Phone number was one on the back of bank cards and correspondence and the caller was on the phone to him for 2 hours .  The caller knew a LOT of details re the account, payees, debits and payments made,  customer number, linked accounts etc. The call was the same as ones we have had in the past, we weren't asked for information, we were told the information and asked if we had authorised the payment. The caller had phoned as they said direct debits had been set up , not from our locality, which had rung an alarm bell for them,  to a few companies, and a large money request had been made to pay money from our business account to another.
  We were very impressed Nat W had picked it up, and were told would all be stopped and new cards sent out the next day and we would also be contacted the next day.  No cards arrived and on phoning Nat W, after an hour on the phone, it turns out the first call was a fraud.  A large amount of money has been paid out of the deposit and business account. 
Nat W, as yet, don't appear to know  how the fraudster managed to know so much about the accounts in question.  We all think we won't be taken in by a fraudster but they are getting very clever.   Please be careful...as I am sure you all are if you are on the Money Tips forum...and reading this!

elsien

The bank should be aware because spoofing of numbers to pretend to be from a trusted source has been around for a while now.

The advice is to call the bank back from a different phone to a number you know is correct. Otherwise the fraudsters will pretend to have ended the call but will still be on the line. 

phebe3

Yes, I realise this as I always do it, and tbh am surprised my husband didn't do this...but am not going to nag him about it, it is what it is...I think he is blaming himself because he didn't, but because they knew pretty well everything about the account, including his customer number, I think he thought it was them. I didn't in fact realise you had to call from a different phone..thank you for that advice...although I did say no comments.

phebe3

I suspected I would get at least one.  It's easy to be wise after an event...hind sight is a wonderful thing as Boris Johnson would agree. I only put the message out as it was such a clever fraud and wanted people to be aware of it.  

carly

I don't understand ;
If the fraudsters knew enough details of the account to remove a large amount of money and did not ask for any further info why would they telephone at all and alert the account holder to their activities?

noitsnotme

There appears to be a big chunk of the story missing. What happened after they told you about the fictitious direct debits?

elsien

phebe3 said:

I suspected I would get at least one.  It's easy to be wise after an event...hind sight is a wonderful thing as Boris Johnson would agree. I only put the message out as it was such a clever fraud and wanted people to be aware of it.  

And I was posting to ensure that people know that phone numbers can be copied as part of the scam, as that was not indicated in your OP. It wasn’t intended as a criticism. 
If you want to warn people then surely warming of how the number showed up as real is relevant? 

It’s an Internet forum. Comments happen. That’s how it works. 

JJ_Egan

It’s an Internet forum. Comments happen. That’s how it works.

My point exactly but OP does not want an open discussion .

tempus_fugit

noitsnotme said:

There appears to be a big chunk of the story missing. What happened after they told you about the fictitious direct debits?

Exactly. Precisely how was money able to be taken from the account if the OP's partner did not give out some secure information? I realise that this can happen to anyone if they drop their guard but the the OP stated that their partner is "VERY money savvy and careful, very aware of fraud and very cautious" obviously wasn't as one of the things that has been known for a long time now is not to just believe that the caller you are speaking to is from where they say they are from, and to call their bank on a separate line and verify if the original call was genuine.

The suggestion is that any of us could fall for something like this and I always think "what new type of scam is this that will fool me", only to find that it is an old, established scam that would never fool me in a million years and could be avoided just by following the usual advice in these situations. If the OP finds that overly critical then I am sorry but if you are telling me I could be caught out then it had better be something actually clever and not just a rehash of an already long-standing type of scam.

tacpot12

My technique if I receive any such calls will be to move all the money out of the account to another account, and change the password on the compromised account before I call my bank. I can always move the money back once I'm happy that the scammers haven't got access to my account.

Laz123

It could be an inside job at Natwest.