"It's frustrating as an investigator knowing that once the money goes offshore, there's very little that I can do." A difficult problem for banks to address "I'm dealing with cases every day, hundreds of thousands of dollars and even in the millions of dollars, people have lost. "It appears that they've pretty much fled Australia at the time of the offending, and in some cases, they were actually offshore when the transactions took place," Acting Sergeant Callegaro said. CCTV cameras captured two of them withdrawing money from ATMs in Sydney and Melbourne an hour into Jenny's four-hour call with the scammer. Most of the mules were identified as Indian nationals who set up accounts with legitimate IDs. "Basically the money hits the mule's account … the mule has been given instructions with bank account information as to where they're to send the money," he said. Most money mule accounts are either created using stolen identities, or set up legitimately by people who are recruited to transfer money, move it offshore, withdraw it or convert it to cryptocurrency, usually for a commission. What is a money mule?Ī money mule is a person whose account is used to transfer illegally acquired funds through the banking system and out of the reach of law enforcement. With the help of the bank, the detective quickly discovered Jenny's money had been transferred to 11 "money mules" with BankWest and Westpac accounts. "It's got to the point where we are inundated, actually," he said. Her file ended up on the desk of Detective Acting Sergeant Marc Callegaro, adding to his ever-growing pile of scam cases.ĭetective Acting Sergeant Marc Callegaro says the rise of data breaches means there is a lot of information out there for scammers to exploit. ![]() I felt conned and I just wanted to do as much as I could to try and retrieve that money." 'We are inundated'Īfter a series of calls with the bank, Jenny went to Victoria Police to report the crime. The bank stopped just one transaction, and $299,996 was successfully stolen. Despite repeatedly asking, Jenny still did not know how much she had lost.īut later that night, she discovered she had given the caller 31 token codes, and each code enabled him to transfer $10,000 from her account. "We're going to try our best to … recoup the funds," he told her, and put her on hold.Īfter 37 minutes, much of it spent on hold, the call ended. Twenty-five minutes into the call, after a series of questions and ID checks, a bank employee tells her "quite a few transactions" have been made. Listening back to Jenny's call with the Commonwealth Bank, you can hear the panic rising in her voice. Now locked out of her accounts, Jenny was feeling more and more uneasy as the man kept telling her he needed more time.įour hours into the call, exhausted and rattled, she hung up and called the bank. The man told her he was dealing with live threats to her accounts, and asked her to read out token codes the bank was sending to her phone. "Then the screen went black and there was 'TeamViewer working securely' written on the screen." Panicked that she could lose it all, she followed the caller's instructions. ![]() The couple is no longer working, but the business accounts still contained hundreds of thousands of dollars - money to fund life after work. "I was a little bit hesitant to do that, but I have used TeamViewer in my work, especially if I need IT help remotely."įor decades, Jenny had worked hard running her husband's GP clinic in eastern Melbourne. ![]() Scammers convinced Jenny they were from the bank and needed to secure her account.
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