“Excuse me, can I just use your phone for 30 seconds to make a call? I am out of battery…” This sentence, we have all heard it before. When Shannon Fraser found herself in this situation, she lent her phone, thinking she was doing the right thing. What she didn’t know was that she had just fallen into a trap that was going to cost her dearly.
She was walking her dog when she says she met a young boy who told her his phone had run out of battery. “My phone is dead. I can’t find my family or friends. I lost them. Can I please use your phone to call them?” Shannon didn’t hesitate and handed him her phone to help the child.
To her, the boy looked about 12 years old. “He had the person on speakerphone. He said something like, ‘I can’t find you guys’. Then he asked me, ‘Do you mind if I go to Maps?’ I accepted and he opened the app. That’s the crazy thing. He was 30 centimeters from me.”recalls Shannon.
After the phone call, they broke up and Shannon didn’t think about it anymore… Until Monday night. “I received alerts from my bank that my two Venmo transfers were approved. One was for $1,800. The other was for $2,000. And that’s when- it hit me right there,” Fraser said.
The deception is then unmasked but much too late. She immediately contacted Venmo and discovered that the boy’s account had been created just 30 minutes before meeting him. To avoid this kind of trap, he was advised to protect his applications with facial recognition and a PIN code. “Most of my applications were protected by the facial recognition. I thought Venmo was too. This was not the case.”
In just three minutes, Shannon says she lost nearly $4,000.