IDCARE Sunshine Coast reports woman scammed out of $1.3 million

Looking for investment opportunities while in lockdown, a mum pumped $1.3 million into what appeared a promising venture. But it was a scam.

Kathy Sundstrom works at identity and cyber support service IDCARE. Picture: Patrick Woods.

OPINION

I thought it was a typo. One of IDCARE’s analysts noticed on a case this week a person had indicated they had lost $1.3 million.

There wasn’t much more detail than that, which made us wonder if there was a mistake and a few extra zeros had been erroneously added to the amount taken.

I picked up the telephone and gave the client a call.

She was well-spoken and she sounded so very frail as she confirmed it was $1.3 million that she had transferred into a scammer’s bank account, thinking it was an investment opportunity.

She told me she saw it highlighted a couple of months ago by The Project on Facebook.

Waleed Aly along with Dick Smith and Andrew Forrest have been the faces scammers have loved to use to give their investment scams an aura of authenticity.

When she saw the write up, which appeared to be from the Network 10 news and current affairs show, she expressed an interest.

Within days, a person phoned her and over the period of a month she was persuaded to part with her life savings – $1.3 million – thinking she would be making more money.

“I thought it was a good opportunity,” she said.

“I thought there had to be other ways to invest money other than a financial advisor where the fees seemed more than the money accruing.”

And then she said the words that explained so much more.

“The scammer was very helpful. That was the lot of it, the communication,” she said.

“He was just a very pleasant person. He talked to me in general and I got looped in or more ways than one.”

She said it happened when more “rounds of lockdown” were starting to happen.

And without being to get about, she was lonely and looking to do something constructive.

“I’m sure there are legitimate companies on the share market and I thought there had to be other ways of investing money,” she said.

She told me she had invested “everything I had”. She had also compromised her driver‘s licence and her passport.

“It still doesn’t seem possible,” she said.

“It is just such a large amount of money, it makes me wonder whether it is just all a bad dream and I’ll wake up from it.”

The only silver lining in this sad story was that her children were still conversing with her.

I have spoken to other clients who were too afraid to tell their children for fear they wouldn’t talk to them again as their potential inheritance was gone.

As soon as this woman told her children, they immediately recognised it was a scam and set about investigating what could be done to retrieve the money. It was too late.

Kathy Sundstrom is a former Sunshine Coast Daily journalist who now works at identity and cyber support service IDCARE.