“My smartphone is broken. I have a new number, dad ”: Johan de Pau received this first WhatsApp message from his scammers on January 16, without suspecting that it was not his daughter, reports HLN. After a quick conversation, his “daughter” asks him to pay a bill for him, because she has “access to nothing”, promising to reimburse him two days later.
Johan paid the requested amount and sent the person she thought was her daughter a screenshot of the transfer. When the scammer asks him for a new payment, Johan understands what is happening, and when he tries to reach his KBC bank, no answer. On the website, he is told to block his cards and report the incident to the police. Nevertheless, the Maldegem police station was empty.
It was later that day that he received a call from a certain BM from KBC’s fraud department. He was also a fraudster… “Perhaps he had seen on the print capture that I am a KBC customer. He said there was an attack going on on my accounts. He was very convincing,” laments Johan. In a panic, he does what the man on the phone asks him to do: transfer 10,000 euros to an account. This continued when he convinced him to transfer 2,000 euros, followed by another 64,000 euros from his business account at ING.
KBC was finally able to intercept the transfer of 10,000 euros. As for the 66,000 euros, they have indeed disappeared. Johan has been the victim of what is known as ‘spoofing’, a technique used by scammers to get a number different from theirs to appear on your phone. Here it was a KBC number. “I can never repeat it enough: a bank will never, ever call you to ask you to transfer money or give you login information,” said Isabelle Marchand, spokesperson for Febelfin.
