Nearly a very expensive phone call

MY WIFE and I had a close shave on Friday, when we were nearly victims of a phishing scam.  Nothing too surprising about that; we were, in fact, the second account holders from our small rural branch to have been attacked that day.

However, certain aspects of what unfolded during that 45-minute phone call did surprise me. And annoy me.

Before I give you the details, I want to assure you that I am not making any of them up.

It all started while we were in town, close to our bank’s local branch, because we were looking after a friend’s dogs for a couple of days.  Which was very, very lucky for us. Had we been at home – on a farm 25km out of town – things might not have gone so well.

In the interests of full disclosure, let me tell you that I have three accounts with that bank, one savings account and two transaction accounts – which the bank insists on calling a cheque account although nobody I know has had a cheque book for at least 15 years.

The reason for the two transaction accounts is simply so that when we occasionally pay for something online we can transfer the exact amount from my everyday account into account number 2 in order to make that payment.  That way the banking details for my normal account are never on the web.  Which shows that we are really quite careful about who knows what when it comes to our money.

The caller, from an 087 number, asked me, in a heavy Afrikaans accent, if I was Mr Leon. “Close enough,” I said, “actually it’s Lyon”.

“Sorry about that, sir,” he replied, “I am calling from the fraud department at XYZ Bank. Can I just check, you have an account number 2342342324 (he had the right number) with us and we suspect it may have been hacked.” Jah, sure.

“Were you at any stage yesterday in or around Benoni?”

“No,” I said, laughing, “I’m in Eshowe and have been for the last couple of days.”

“Oh, you’re not in Entumeni then?” he said and proceeded to give me (correctly) my full street address, and then tell me that someone had tried to place a bet for R9 900 with Hollywood Bets, using my account and the bank was concerned that this might have been fraudulent.

At this stage I started to wonder if this guy might actually be genuine.  He knew my account number, my residential address and my ID number.  Surely he could only have got that from the bank’s internal records?

He then said he wanted to block the account temporarily and started asking me about the card linked to the account.  At this stage I pleaded the standard Born Before Computers excuse and handed him over to my wife, who knows more about my accounts than I do, anyway.

Long story short, he kept her on the phone for almost half-an-hour, trying to get her to re-set log-in numbers and change other codes.

Eventually, she told him she was not comfortable doing that and she would prefer to go into the bank in the morning.

“F*#k you,” he said, and rang off.

That was when the fun started.

My wife knew we had very little money in either of my transaction accounts, so she checked the savings account.  Which had been cleaned out. The transaction reference was “F*#k you, bitch”.

“Right,” I said, “we’re off to the bank.”

We were in the bank within five minutes of the phone call ending, and it all turned out ok. The money in the savings account had been moved to one of my transaction accounts (you cannot pay anyone other than the account holder from a savings account), and luckily our friendly caller had not managed to get what he needed from my wife to allow him to complete the theft.

So we all breathed a huge sigh of relief, I got a new card and equilibrium was restored.

“Surely you should be able to track the caller from the phone number he used to make the call,” I said.

“Have you still got the number?” asked the lady from the bank.

I gave her the number.

”Oh,” she said, “that’s one of the numbers for our fraud department.”  

No surprises there, then!

Richard Lyon

16.06.26