Financial scams targeting the elderly are not entirely new in Canada.
Last year, an international telephone scam targeting seniors led to one arrest, while similar scams, involving SIN numbers, Netflix refunds, people asking for money to cover relatives’ legal fees and others have also started popping up.
A new Apple support scam is now doing the rounds, and a Saskatoon woman, Jeannette Roy, fell victim to this scheme and lost $10,000 in the process.
According to Roy, she received an alert on her iPad one morning claiming that her account was being compromised by Russian hackers who were trying to buy child pornography. The alert also instructed her to call a number for Apple support. According to CTV News‘ report, Roy is normally able to spot a scam, but when she saw instructions to contact Apple support, she thought the alert was legitimate.
Roy subsequently called the number, and a person identifying as an Apple support agent answered. He asked Roy which bank she uses, so that he could connect her to the bank’s “fraud investigators.” A person posing as a fraud investigator from TD Bank came on and convinced Roy to withdraw money from her account so that the hackers wouldn’t be able to access it.
“He says don’t speak with anyone because we don’t know whether it was someone at the bank,” according to Roy’s statement given to CTV News. Roy withdrew $10,000 from her bank account, and was told to deposit it to a Bitcoin ATM machine at a nearby convenience store. Roy followed his instructions and deposited the money into the Bitcoin ATM machine, which converted it into cryptocurrency and transferred it to an unknown recipient.
By the time Roy got home, she realized something was wrong, but it was too late to recover her money. She had been scammed. “I had never heard anything on the media about the particular situation I encountered on Tuesday, and people need to be aware of that situation,” she said.
TD Bank issued a statement saying that branch staff are there to help customers and that they should always be honest with them when completing a transaction, while the Saskatoon Police Service also urged the public to be vigilant against possible fraud and not to be coerced by scammers who use urgency and panic to manipulate them.
Read CTV News’ full report on the scam here.
Source: CTV News
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