SOURCE: → 'I had £3,000 stolen via WhatsApp job scam message' [BBC NEWS UK]
KEY INFORMATION:
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18 year old Bella Betterton from Devon had first been contacted by scammers via WhatsApp messages and then phone calls and thought she had taken part in a real job interview as she had put her CV out prior.
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The scammers carried out what Bella thought was a genuine interview with her over the phone for a remote working job involving her using their money to buy and review products. The criminals groomed Bella with dozens and dozens of messages and phone calls until, over the course of a few hours one afternoon, they used all the details they’d tricked out of her, along with what she suspects was malware put on her phone, to make four large card payments to an unidentified cryptocurrency exchange using her money.
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Scammers might ask for small amounts of money upfront, which they claim will be reimbursed in a victim’s first pay cheque for what are genuine things - such as DBS checks, security checks, small bits of equipment.
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New figures show the amount of money reported stolen via recruitment scam text and WhatsApp messages jumped from £20,000 to nearly £1m in the past year. City of London Police say the number of people reporting these scams to Action Fraud increased more than eightfold. But this may just be “the tip of the iceberg”, according to City of London Police Temporary Commander Oliver Shaw, as this type of fraud is “hugely underreported”.
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Figures from City of London Police show 15 people reported being scammed out of £20,040 to Action Fraud in 2022. Last year, 126 people reported a total of £977,581 being stolen from them and Dr Lis Carter, a criminologist at Kingston University, who is also an expert in the language and phrases fraudsters use to trick their victims, says recruitment scams are a high-volume, multi-stage crime.
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Bella’s bank has refused to refund her as a victim of fraud, although she is now challenging that decision with the Financial Ombudsman Service. Meanwhile, she is working even more hours as a waitress to try to make up the money that was stolen, and says what’s happened has changed her as a person.
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The £3,000 that was stolen was all the money she had managed to save up by working full-time over the summer. She is hoping to start a five-year biochemistry degree next year so has taken a gap year to try to save up £10,000 to be able to afford to start studying.
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