A NSW man’s insistence that he verify a caller’s claims led the would-be scammer to drop their act in frustration.
Ray received a call from a man claiming to be from NAB Bank, telling him there had been an attempted transaction on his account in New Zealand.
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The man knew Ray’s personal details and claimed to have sent a text message from a NAB number.
“He sent me a text message with a link and he wanted me to open the text,” Ray said.
The man, Ray said, had a British accent and “said everything you expect NAB would say”.
“But he called me off a private number,” Ray said.
“He had an excuse for that. He had an excuse for everything.”
Ray’s partner Kathleen thought the situation felt off, so Ray put his phone on speaker and Kathleen began to record.
“I told him I wasn’t going to open the text and he was getting irritated,” Ray said.
“When he started getting irritated, I knew this guy was a scammer.
“I said to him, ‘No, I’m not going to open this text until I get confirmation from NAB’ because I wasn’t just going to open a random text from someone calling off a private number.”
Ray told the scammer he was going to call NAB himself to verify the information.
Before the scammer hung up on Ray, he said: “OK, f*** yourself, love you, bye bye.”
The recording highlighted common red flags Australians should watch out for to protect themselves from scams, NAB executive of group investigations and former Australian Federal Police executive Chris Sheehan said.
“Ray did the right thing,” Sheehan said.
“NAB will never call you and ask you to share your one-time PIN, transfer money to another account to keep it safe, give us remote access to your devices or provide personal information like your driver’s licence details.
“Criminals are masters at being insistent and pushy to create a sense of fear or urgency. Their goal is to pressure the person to make the payment themselves or share personal details, such as log-in details or one-time passcodes.
“If you aren’t sure if it is NAB calling you, hang up and call the bank yourself using the number on the back of your card or via searching it on our public website.”
NAB working to combat scams
The biggest red flags for an impersonation scam are unexpected contact, urgency for action and listing personal information that may have been obtained through avenues such as data breaches, according to NAB.
Sheehan said NAB had a bank-wide strategy to reduce the impact of scams, which are a global epidemic and cost Australians more than $3 billion in 2022.
“While phone phishing remains an issue, we have seen a 77 per cent reduction in cases,” he said.
“A number of initiatives have contributed to the reduction.
“We worked with telecommunications providers to put protections in place to make it harder for criminals to impersonate bank phone numbers and infiltrate legitimate text message threads.
“This means that scam calls may appear as an unknown number or no caller ID, like in Ray’s case, whereas previously they might have appeared to come from a legitimate bank number.
“NAB has also removed links from text messages we send customers to make it easier to identify when a message is legitimate. Text messages are the biggest front door to phishing scams.
“We are working hard every day to reduce the impact of scams. We can, and will, do more.”