YouTube<\/a> channel, believes they stitched together a profile on him based on videos he had uploaded.<\/p>\nTom Honeyands \u2018The Tech Chap\u2019 was caught off-guard when he was tired and jet-lagged. Photograph: The Tech Chap<\/p>\n
\u201cThe only thing I can think of is that banking icons are on my computer home screen,\u201d he says. \u201cI make video content for a living and if someone sees Lloyds, that\u2019s one bit of information.\u201d<\/p>\n
It was late at night when he was called by scammers, who, he suspects, knew that he was travelling because of posts on his social media feeds. The jet lag and late hour added to him being confused and tired, and he fell for the phishing scam.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was at a dinner, and it was difficult to hear. That definitely contributed to me not paying full attention,\u201d says Honeyands, who answered a number of questions about his personal details.<\/p>\n
\u201cI feel like I am a fairly intelligent guy. I should know better. They knew my name, address, who I banked with, that I was travelling,\u201d he says. \u201cYou can put together enough information to phone me and, just this once, it worked, which is pretty embarrassing.\u201d<\/p>\n
What it looks like<\/p>\n
A fraudster calls and says that they are from your bank\u2019s fraud team and that you need to take action to help them protect your money.<\/p>\n
In Honeyands case the scammer claimed he had to cancel payments that had been made to the account and that codes would be sent to Honeyands to verify the cancellations. However, they were actually verifications for new payees.<\/p>\n
Honeyands made 12 verifications over a few hours which allowed the criminals to make payments totalling \u00a370,000.<\/p>\n
A warning from Lloyds bank about fraud. But unsuspecting Honeyands had its icon displayed on his computer home screen. Photograph: Stephen Frost\/Alamy<\/p>\n
It was only when Lloyds\u2019 real security team rang him that he hung up on the criminals. \u201cI had the hacker on hold and the actual bank security team on another line and was thinking, \u2018Who is real?\u2019,\u201d he says. The real Lloyds caller told him to hang up on both, and then call back on the number on the back of his bank card, which he did.<\/p>\n
What to do<\/p>\n
Based on his experience, he advises people to be aware of what detail they are sharing online. \u201cIt\u2019s like the old thing of not sharing social posts when you\u2019re travelling because your house is empty. In a similar way, if you ever show pictures of your phone screen and it has your bank on it, then that\u2019s one more bit of information for the criminals.\u201d<\/p>\n
Lloyds tells customers that if a call is suspicious in any way, that they should call back on a trusted line and use a number for the bank such as that written on the back of its debit cards.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When Tom Honeyands realised he had been defrauded out of \u00a370,000 he was furious and embarrassed \u2013 and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":735910,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[49,48,61],"class_list":["post-735909","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/735909","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=735909"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/735909\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/735910"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=735909"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=735909"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=735909"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}