Scams target real estate sales via payment redirection
Scammers are increasingly targeting real estate sales by breaking into email accounts or impersonating email addresses of businesses. While these payment redirection scams are on the rise the amount Australians are losing overall to scams has fallen.
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00:00After years of helping people with their finances, Lily has now become a victim of fraud.
00:08When she sold her apartment, her real estate agent accidentally transferred the deposit,
00:13worth $26,000, to a scammer.
00:16I can't sleep properly.
00:19I can't eat properly.
00:21I can't have a normal life.
00:23Every minute for me is suffering.
00:27Both Lily and her real estate agent, HT Wills, were targets of a payment redirection scam.
00:33The agent emailed Lily, asking for her bank account number.
00:38She responds promptly with her ING details.
00:41But minutes later, without Lily knowing, a scammer sends an email from her account with
00:46new details from a different bank.
00:49The agent emails back to ask which one is correct.
00:52This time, they receive a third set of bank details.
00:56And instead of phoning Lily to verify them, the agent ends up paying the money into the
01:01scammer's account.
01:02HT Wills is refusing to return Lily's deposit.
01:06Its lawyers have told us that the incident is still being investigated, and that they're
01:11unable to provide further comments at this time.
01:14Australians in general are quite susceptible to these kind of attacks.
01:19The level of cyber literacy in Australia is relatively low.
01:23In the last financial year, just under 289,000 consumers told the ACCC that they'd been scammed.
01:31That's a small drop compared to the year before.
01:34The amount they lost was $330 million.
01:38That's a 41% fall compared to the previous 12 months.
01:41We are cautiously optimistic that the data sharing and the awareness raising that we
01:47are doing through the National Anti-Scam Centre is beginning to have an impact.
01:53But not soon enough for victims like Lily.