Phishing

Armaan lost his job in a local restaurant when they were shut down due to the pandemic. His boss had advised he had applied to get the JobKeeper allowance for his staff.

Not long after, Armaan saw he had an ‘Subsidy Benefit Allowance’ email in his inbox, that looked to be from the Australian Government. The email indicated that Armaan was required to provide some more information before they could make any payments to him. As Armaan was waiting to hear back about benefits, he thought it was legitimate.

The email advised that for Armaan to confirm his eligibility, he needed to reply with his name, address, date of birth and Tax File Number, as well as attaching a copy of his drivers licence or passport, and a copy of his medicare card. He attached the requested information and sent the email back.

The email was a phishing email and Armaan had sent his personal details through to a scammer. With the information they had, the scammers were able to impersonate Armaan and apply for phone services and other accounts in his name.

Iris received a call from someone claiming to be from a local postal/courier service, saying they were unsuccessful in delivering a parcel, as full postage costs had not been covered by the sender. She had recently made some online purchases, so assumed it related to one of the packages she was waiting on.

The caller asked Iris to provide her name and address details to confirm she was the owner of the package they had. They advised they could arrange redelivery if Iris covered the outstanding postal costs as well as a redelivery fee.

Iris provided her credit card number, expiry date and 3-digit CVC code to them to arrange this.

Iris became concerned when she received all the packages she was waiting for by standard mail and started seeing transactions on her credit card that she had not made. It was not long after when Iris’ bank contacted her about some overseas transactions that had come through on her credit card.  She had been scammed.

Anja was scrolling through her social media feed and noticed that some of her friends had posted a fun quiz that generated the ‘type of person’ they were, so she decided to give it a go.

Anja clicked on the quiz link and had to complete a number of random questions such as the place where she was born, the first street she lived on, the name of her first pet, favourite colour etc to generate the response, which Anja then posted for her friends to see, and try for themselves.

What Anja didn’t realise is that the questions and answers she had just input are quite often the same questions that you might be asked, when opening new accounts or validating your identity on secure sites.

With the information collected, as well as other details sourced from her social media profile, the scammers were able to impersonate Anja and apply for credit cards in her name.