WhatsApp scam victim transferred £20k

A woman says she felt "sick" when she was tricked into transferring £20,000 to criminals after being persuaded to share her screen on a WhatsApp call.

Felicity Campbell has been describing the moment she realised she had been caught in an elaborate scam by someone pretending to be from her bank.

The scam started when Mrs Campbell, from Bleasby in Nottinghamshire, responded to a fake TV licensing email and entered her credit card details.

When she realised it had been a phishing email, she contacted her bank and cancelled the card – but the deceit did not end there.

Five days later, she received a call from a man claiming to be from her bank, she told BBC Radio 4's You and Yours.

“The man on the other end of the line said, ‘this is the Nationwide calling. Did you respond to a phishing email from TV Licensing?’," she said.

“I said I had. And he said ‘we're a little bit concerned that your online account has been compromised. Have you made a payment of £1,500 to Western Union? And I said ‘no, I definitely have not’.”

Becoming suspicious, Mrs Campbell challenged the man, asking whether he really was from Nationwide – in response, he told her details of her address and recent transactions – all of which were correct.

“He said ‘are you sure you have not made a payment of £1,500 to Western Union?’ And I said I have not. And he said ‘OK, well we think your account has been compromised.

“’I now need to help you make the account secure.’”

The man ended the call and rang back via WhatsApp, asking Mrs Campbell if she was happy to continue.

“Reluctantly, feeling a little sick, I have to say, because I wasn't absolutely sure, but I said OK,” she said.

“He then instructed me to press a few buttons on my phone.”

These instructions, apparently so he could “guide” her through making her accounts safe, actually led Mrs Campbell to share her screen with the man, which is a function WhatsApp introduced for its calls last year.

This allowed him to see what was on her phone, including that she had other accounts, with Lloyds, and Wise – a money services provider that specialises in international cash transfers.

For the next hour and a half, the man instructed Mrs Campbell to shuffle different sums of money between these accounts – and also into a separate Western Union account - watching the transactions go through using screen share, all under the guise of helping her.

“All the while he's saying to me ‘we are managing to recover the money, but we've got to act fast because it's going out fast’,” she said.

“So I'm seeing them coming in thinking, ‘well the money's being recovered’, but you know, stupid me, didn't realise that he was shuffling it all into my Wise account.”

At one point he persuaded her to take out a £25,000 loan, apparently to “block” another loan he claimed had been taken out.

Mrs Campbell said: “If that one instruction had come in isolation, I would have said….what planet do you think I live on?

“But because I'd been groomed and everything was making me feel more and more fearful and more and more insecure, you get swept along by the scammers insistence of acting now.”

When the loan arrived in her account and she was asked to transfer it out, Mrs Campbell decided enough was enough.

“On the second transfer I said, ‘OK, I am now really uncomfortable.

“’I don't want to continue this’. And he said, quote unquote, ‘go F yourself, madam’.

“And I knew I'd been had. I felt so sick, I can't tell you.”

A total of £20,000 of Mrs Campbell’s money had been transferred from her accounts to Western Union.

Western Union told You and Yours that these payments went to named accounts in India.

Mrs Campbell has since managed to recover some of the money from her banks.

Nationwide has refunded her £6,000, covering the money moved out of that account, and said it was investigating how the criminal got into her bank account to know the details of her transactions.

Lloyds is investigating and has refunded £2,000 relating to debit card transactions Mrs Campbell made under the instruction of the criminal.

It said in cases where funds are transferred between someone's accounts, responsibility for refunds lies with the bank from where they were transferred to the fraudster.

Wise said it had sent a number of warning messages to Mrs Campbell asking if the payments were being made by her – and that she had pressed the button on her phone confirming they were.

Wise also said it had refunded her for about half of the transactions it had allowed to go through after she had reported the fraud – which comes to about £6,000.