Trust Nobody Today....or Tomorrow!

Scams today are Big Business, you not only stand to lose your money, but possibly your life!

The Law is here to protect us you say?.....Wrong!

We all know that Internet scams can evolve from anywhere in the world, and that just one simple click of a mouse can change your life for either the next few years....or perhaps forever.

Wham Bam Thankyou Scam.

This is a true story of a normal, everyday person who was scammed out of a lot of money.
A fool?.....Well, yes, for want of a better word!
An idiot?....No, I dont think so!
An honest man?....most certainly yes!
A determined man?....for sure!
A man who is now better educated about the ways of the modern world and internet communications?...absolutely!
A man who is protected with the law on his side?.....NO!

This is an absorbing video on what can happen to anyone who doesn't read the signs about 'unsolicited contact' that may seem totally legitimate, but is too good to be true.

If you have a spare hour in your life, watch this video from the link above....it may help to expose the horrors of what scammers are capable of doing to you.

Stay safe peeps!

Rep

 

Interesting video and I can attest to his problems from firsthand experience of trying to get money back from abroad.
When my wife's tax return was stolen from our mailbox two years ago, it enabled an Indian group of crooks to steal her ID and withdraw AU$12,000 from our account and make a second attempt for another AU$10,000 two days later. The perpetrators were identified by police down to their home addresses in Mumbai, India as well as their co-conspirators and they even had pictures of them withdrawing the money in cash in Mumbai from bank security pictures. Sadly, Interpol were not going to proceed because they said the financial loss was too small and the effort required to proceed to a conviction is not economically viable plus there were further problems due to high level corruption in the system, all their effort would most likely be wasted because a conviction is unlikely when the crooks pay off the right people.
Lucky for us I had called the bank within minutes of the first transaction as I get email notifications when transactions on my accounts occur, over set limits, and so then they started monitoring my accounts. It took three months of having all of my bank accounts and cards suspended to be sure no other accounts would be accessed and when the bank was satisfied they gave me all new account numbers and gave me all our money back as we are protected against fraud.

We didn't do anything wrong and because some of our mail was stolen from our locked mailbox and then the bank allowed the crooks to access our accounts firstly, without knowing the verbal access phrase and then also not having a mobile phone number that was on the list of permitted phones to use for verification purposes so the bank knew they were at fault as they facilitated the fraudulent withdrawal by not following their own ID verification protocols and they had to refund our money. The money was never recovered by the bank and is a small part of the millions of dollars they lose every year.
Luckily for me, my tax return was still being processed by the ATO (Australian Tax Office) so hadn't been sent yet.
Now, for security reasons, we have a permanent Post Office divert on all incoming mail to our street address which now goes direct to a Post Office Box. The divert doesn't even happen at our local Post Office, it happens at the Central Mail Sorting Exchange where new labels directing the mail to the PO Box are stuck over the address on the envelope by sorting machines. The number and location of the Post Office Box is never disclosed to anybody else so when people send us mail they think it is going to our street address when in actual fact it is relabeled with our PO Box number on a sticker covering our street address and then is delivered directly to the relevant Post Office (by a different delivery schedule).
Still not a perfect system but there have been no further problems since taking this action

 

I feel for ya mate, but its 2019 now and any correspondence for financial transactions should not be sent via snail mail anymore.
Everything should be processed and delivered online and be protected behind your security tailgate.

 

Yep we always submit everything to ATO electronically via our accountant but this was the ATO sending their notification direct to my wife and unfortunately it had her tax file number on it and enough other info to allow the crooks to fill in the gaps.
AFAIK the ATO still sends out snail mail notifications saying they have paid your refund (if you got one) into your account or cheque attached or requesting further payment if there was a shortfall.
BTW the ATO has both of our email addresses as does Centrelink and both government agencies still send via both email AND snail mail although now any snail mail sent to our address gets diverted to an unlisted PO Box without the sender's knowledge.
My accountant has been submitting our tax returns electronically ever since the ATO started the system 12 or so years ago but the ATO still send snail mail to notify us of refunds even though I have requested they send all correspondence to my accountant.
Government agencies are usually very inflexible in the way they do things making them difficult to deal with and causing large amounts of frustration..........and off on a tangent don't get me started on the ATO only natively supporting Mozilla Firefox if you want to have business online access to them for lodging quarterly BAS (Business Activity Statements), GST (Goods and Services Tax) reporting and superannuation reporting.......IE does work but you have to apply a patch and sometimes access is a bit flaky at the login stage and if Microsoft update any of the IE modules you usually have to get another patch from the ATO tech support people. If you use any other browser you aren't able see the login screen due to the way they have implemented Java and the lack of support for Java in most browsers.......lucky for me the last time I had to fix the IE patch thing was June 28th 2018 in preparation for the company accountant submitting EOFY.......since then I have been semi retired and someone else is the IT Admin hehehehe

 

Interesting points Rep and Joffa.

Joffa, excellent point of how to safeguard your "snail" mail by having your home address used for mail which (with a fee) is actually redirected to a Post Office Box - something I've always done so I never have to worry if I'm not home to pick up mail.

 

I reckon the AU$144 for mail divert and AU$150 for the PO box is chump change for the security it brings. My only issue is that I can't get the redirect for more than 12 months and so I have set an automatic reminder to renew.......I stuffed up the other year and forgot to renew as Australia Post don't issue reminders and so when I paid one day late I then had to go through the application process all over again and so then I lost a week and a half of coverage while they processed the application......silly Australia Post rules prevented them just renewing my old account
Hopefully this rule has been changed and surely now you can lodge your application electronically it will be faster but I don't trust them hence the reminder to self .......

 

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