Journey into Buddhism
About a month ago, my wife and I suffered a financial scam, losing a sizeable amount of money. The resultant pain and suffering were viscerally real. In order to help others in whatever way we can, the idea of this website was born. The purpose of the website is (1) to inform others about scams and (2) to offer insights we have gained that may also help others to cope with their grievous loss.
I do not usually answer unknown calls, especially if they are from interstate. That morning, as we were having breakfast, our landline phone rang in the other room. Not being able to see where the call was coming from, I got up from the sofa and picked up our portable handset near to where we were breakfasting. Events happened quickly in the conversation – and both my husband and I got hooked and ended up being drawn into a financial scam, where under normal circumstances we would have never ventured.
Regrettably, a scam situation has happened to countless others. In fact, more and more people are becoming victims of scams and losing large sums of money. As scammers become ever more sophisticated, more and more unsuspecting people will become victims – unless well informed about scams and constantly vigilant.
The call on that fateful morning came from a lady supposedly from the Security Department of VISA and Master Card of our bank. She asked if I had made two specific transactions on my VISA card earlier that day. When I said no, she said there was other suspicious activity on our account and transferred me to the Fraud and Detection department (which does exist at the bank). I ended up talking to a woman by the name of Catherine. She said that 74 attempts were made to withdraw money from our accounts during the past week, all traceable to the local bank branch. She asked that, in order to help them catch the perpetrator(s), I go to the bank and withdraw a sum from my account and deposit it temporarily (for one hour) into a cloud account at the neighbouring bank. At that time, she sounded plausible and convinced us that she was trying to help us and we were helping her. Unwittingly, she swayed my husband and me to trust her and under the emotion of the moment, we did as she asked. Unfortunately, only later did we realize that she was a fraudster herself, transferring money directly or indirectly from our account to accomplices!
During the interactions with Catherine, she had me download apps for the purpose of gaining access to my computer. She seemed to have known ahead of time what accounts I had – hence her foul motive was not immediately obvious. She said she would call the next day to further work on the matter. Unfortunately, she also transferred a sizeable sum of money from one of our accounts into another location. Our call ended with reassurances that the two sums of money taken out of our accounts would be restored at the end of the following business day (a Friday).
Thankfully, by early evening the same day, we discerned what was happening, and I reported the scam/fraud to the bank early the next morning – at 3:30 am because I was unable to sleep. They locked access to our internet banking and advised us not to have further communication with the scammer, so we ignored all the calls the next day which were numerous.
Looking back the next day, both my husband and I couldn’t believe that we did what we were asked to do. It was almost like a spell was cast over us. Our emotions were activated and our judgment suspended. We were so uninformed about scams – we knew that scammers existed out there, but we never paid close attention.
Yet, sadly, we are far from being alone to whom something of this nature has happened. Millions are being scammed around the world of large amounts of money. Senior citizens (as we both now are), especially, are vulnerable to scammers’ tactics (which are documented in another section of the website).
May this website benefit all visitors – by both being informed about scams and bringing comfort and insight to those who have suffered a scam setback.
Eva and Alexander Peck