There's no profile for a scammer, they say
With scams becoming ever more sophisticated, fraud investigators at BNZ discussed what aspects bank scams shared and what the common signs were.
Nic Vryenhoek, BNZ financial crime investigator, said he’s happy when a customer he’s calling to warn they are being scammed is suspicious.
“They should be. My key message is to question everything,” Vryenhoek told The Detail. “If someone calls you purporting to be from the bank or anywhere else you should be questioning if they are who they say they are.”
He said he never asks customers for their personal information – he already has that – nor will he ask them to install anything on their computer.
He also fully supports a customer who hangs up a call to contact the bank using a number they recognise and trust.
The problem, though, is when customers ignore a warning that they are being scammed.
Vryenhoek said romance scams are some of the worst cases, because the experience is so stressful, people never forget about it.
“What would I be in that situation? I'd be stressed, nervous, I'd be worried,” he said.
But Vryenhoek and Ashley Kai Fong (pictured above), head of financial crime in BNZ's fraud protection team, wanted scam victims to shake off the humiliation and embarrassment and talk about it.
Kai Fong said part of the problem was New Zealanders were too trusting, making them a “nice target.”
Over the past year, around $183 million has gone out of New Zealanders’ accounts, up 20% on the prior year, but a mere one-1000th of a per cent of the BNZ transactions were fraud.
And it’s because these cases were “very small” that the bank can’t just stop every suspicious-looking transaction in its tracks, leaving customers unable to do their transactions, Kai Fong said.
BNZ’s main message is that customers should recognise the signs. The bank also warned young Kiwis to not be fooled into thinking they won’t be fooled.
“We’ve got some research that says that 24- to 44-year-olds who think they’re digital natives because they’ve grown up with it, they think they're not susceptible to a scam. They're just as susceptible as anybody else,” Kai Fong said. “One of the issues is because they’re so comfortable with technologies they get a bit complacent sometimes.”
Just as there’s no typical victim, there’s also no profile for a scammer either. There’s just no way to know what the tipping point for criminality is for somebody.
“We’re in a cost-of-living crisis at the moment, and you just don’t know what the tipping point is for somebody to become a money mule or maybe think it's a great idea to go and start scamming people...” Kai Fong told The Detail.
“There could be somebody who's desperate out there who thinks ‘this could be a get-rich scheme for me...’ ‘I’m not really hurting anybody,’ because you can’t see your victims. But actually, what you’re doing is causing a whole lot of harm in the community, and a lot of suffering for people.
“It’s their day job ... they’re thinking of ways to do it all the time.
“Some of them are quite brazen. They’re fighting for their livelihood – which is your money.”
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