Hackers Tricked a London Based Woman of Life Savings

BBC.com published news on 24th June, 2015 stating that a 59 year old woman namely Vivian Gabb, based at London, explained how she was cheated of her life savings by scamsters who sent her a phishing notification in her inbox.

Mrs. Grab, a Pilates and tennis trainer, was finalizing a house to buy when the fraudsters struck.

She did not know that her email account had been hijacked and cybercriminals could monitor each and every email she sent and received.

They emailed her a message hidden as a follow-up mail from her solicitor Chris Smee, asking her to deposit around 50,000 Pound into their account.

It emerged after four days that the money had not gone to her solicitor (referring to Chris Smee) but instead gone straight to a scam creator.

The fraudster had created an email address and a TSB bank account under the same name as her solicitor.

By the time, she reported her banker Halifax about the incident, the money had already gone out of TSB account of the criminal.

Dailymail.co.uk published news on 24th June, 2015 quoting Mrs Grabb as saying "I had thought that banks would have done everything to trace the money and freeze it but it seems that nobody have any sense of urgency."

Mrs Grabb says that Halifax has confirmed that they are not responsible in any way for this incident and TSB will not talk to me due to issues related to protection of data.

Dailymail.co.uk published news on 24th June, 2015 quoting an explanation by Spokesman of Halifax as "this type of scam is known as 'social engineering' which is a non-technical type of intrusion used by hackers which depends heavily on human interaction and frequently involves fooling people in breaking normal security procedures."

Unfortunately, it is not only UK but senior citizens all over the world are targeted by cyber criminals with a case being reported from Texas. Wanda Barcomb, a retired licensed tax preparer, recently received a fake email claiming to be from IRS, American taxing agency, asking her to call on a number given in the fake email. However, Barcomb knew that it was a scam email.

» SPAMfighter News - 7/6/2015