Hard-working Albany teen loses more than $36,500 of life savings to scammer impersonating NAB

An 18-year-old Albany woman has been told by NAB that there is nothing it can do to replace more than $36,500 in savings she lost by someone pretending to be from the bank just weeks from Christmas. Now she is warning others to be vigilant of scammers “because they are getting too smart”. On December 6 Aurora Casilli received a text message she believed to be from her bank because it appeared in the same conversation as previous and subsequent messages from the bank. It gave her a code for a payment and said if she had not authorised the payment to call a 1800 number. She said she called the number in a panic and was immediately given the same options to choose from as she would on a legitimate NAB call line. The thought that it was a legitimate call was reinforced by the fact she had to “wait over an hour”. “They then put me through to the right person, he said who he was, he asked for my name, my date of birth, my address and was verifying all my details,” Ms Casilli said. “He then told me there was someone trying to hack into my account and I quickly need to transfer my money into a new account.” Still in a panic, Ms Casilli said she completed the transfer then was promptly hung up on. It was at that point she started to realise she might have lost the savings she had put aside through hard work at Woolworths and Domino’s part-time jobs since the age of 14. “That’s when me and my partner looked at each other — like what the heck?” she said. Return phone calls were then made to the 1800 number, then the NAB helpline as well as the Commonwealth Bank helpline, because the account Ms Casilli had been told to transfer the money to was a Commonwealth Bank account. Ms Casilli said there was another long wait on hold before she was transferred to the NAB fraud team, when after waiting another hour she was eventually told there would be an investigation that would take four to six weeks. Her partner, who had called Commonwealth Bank to try to block the transfer, was told the only thing the bank could do was flag the account. At the conclusion of NAB’s investigation last week Ms Casilli was sent an email which contained an offer of $3000 as a “full and final resolution”. The email said NAB’s view was that it was not liable for the loss because “the transaction was authorised by you, NAB provided relevant internet banking warning and made reasonable attempts to recoup the funds”. “Unfortunately, there are no further options for NAB to pursue to return the funds to you,” it said. Ms Casilli said she would not accept the offer designed to “keep her as a customer” in favour of getting the Australian Financial Complaints Authority to investigate further. NAB executive group investigations and fraud Chris Sheehan said the bank could not comment on individual cases when contacted by the Advertiser. He said there had been “a significant increase in scams in recent years and it’s upsetting to see the devastating effects these can have”. “Scammers can use software that makes the phone number they’re calling or texting from appear on your device as belonging to a well-known organisation, such as a bank, the police or the tax office,” he said. “Criminals can send messages with the sender’s name set to ‘NAB’, or other organisations, which means their messages can appear in the same thread as other official texts sent from NAB. “When a customer receives a text message or call impersonating NAB, it means a criminal has ‘spoofed’ our number and is impersonating us. “NAB’s systems have not been breached in any way.” The ordeal has left Ms Casilli questioning whether she would have been better off not working so hard after school. She was saving for a potential move to Perth for university or a future house deposit. She said she wanted to raise awareness about scams because she recognised things could have been a lot worse had she been in a different situation instead of in full-time employment. “It’s so easy to say ‘oh, you know it won’t happen to me, I won’t get affected’ because that’s what I thought,” she said. “I have to pay for rent and have to pay my bills but what happens if I was like a single mum and that’s all the money I had left? “What if there was nowhere to fall back to?”