QUICK-thinking bank employees saved a Sunshine Bay retiree from being robbed of hundreds of dollars by a computer phone scam last week.
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David Greenhill received a call from a man “with an Indian accent” early last Wednesday afternoon.
“He said my computer was causing problems and had a large number of errors,” Mr Greenhill said.
“He said that when I accessed the internet it was passing problems on to other websites.”
Having heard about many people being conned out of their money by such calls, Mr Greenhill asked how he was to know that it was not a scam.
“He said ‘oh no we are quite genuine’ and that he was calling from Telstra, and was monitoring computer errors,” Mr Greenhill said.
“He got me to go and open up my computer and type “team biewer” (into the browser).
“I was still very suspicious, but he sounded very genuine, and I wasn’t sure what to do. I was asking questions all the time.
“He said his technician would put things right with the computer.”
The words Mr Greenhill typed into his browser brought up two large rectangles which formed the basis of a central processing unit usage graph.
The call lasted about one-and-a-half-hours and eventually the caller told Mr Greenhill that the work was finished and the computer was okay.
“He said that the problem had been that I hadn’t registered with Microsoft, and that this would only cost $5.99,” he said.
“He asked for my credit card details and I gave it to him.
“I had a mental lapse.”
He realised his error when he tried to pay for a doctor’s appointment the following day using his credit card.
“I found that my credit card had been blocked,” he said.
“I phoned ANZ and they said they had blocked the card due to a strange attempted transaction. It was for 240-odd dollars and from a source I had never used before. “They got suspicious and didn’t pay it, and blocked the card. They were very on the ball. I’ve got a lot of admiration for ANZ.”
Mr Greenhill believes it would have been disappointing for the scammers to get so close to success and yet so far away.
“An hour-and-a-half is a big investment in time to put in to get nothing from it,” he said.
In the meantime, he said from now on he would be “very careful”.
