$400 Optus bill uncovers Melbourne couple’s living nightmare

A Melbourne couple noticed an odd charge on their monthly phone bill. When they looked into it, they realised they were in a world of trouble.

A Melbourne couple are warning others after a thief stole their identities, committed tax fraud under their names and tried to take all their superannuation money.

Raphael Wong and his wife Tiffany had their hands full during Victoria’s 70-day lockdown last year caring for their newborn baby.

It had entirely slipped the minds of the new mum and dad that just a few months prior, in February 2021, Tiffany had ordered a driver’s licence which was meant to be arriving in the mail.

Months went by and it never came.

Then in early August, something strange happened.

Tiffany’s phone switched to “SOS only” mode where she was unable to make any phone calls.

They also started getting charged an extra $400 a week on their phone bill.

“We’ve got a newborn, managing life in lockdown and that, we didn’t notice the phone thing [for a while],” Raphael, 32, told news.com.au. “It was a couple of weeks before we cottoned on.”

It was the last thing this couple needed while raising a newborn baby.

Looking into the new bill, the couple learned that they had apparently bought a brand new iPhone and iPad through their phone company Optus for around $2000, which they were paying off in monthly instalments of $400.

The problem was, they had never made the purchase.

Raphael and Tiffany looked at their Optus mobile phone plan and realised all their details had changed to email addresses that didn’t belong to them.

“Once we realised someone had updated our details, that’s when alarm bells started to ring,” Raphael recalled.

Around the same time, Tiffany was having trouble logging into her email address.

“We were having trouble logging in, we would keep having to recover it, then lose access,” Raphael said.

“The password kept getting changed, the more I had to do it, the time between changing the passwords became less and less until we lost it completely.”

He suspects a hacker stole Tiffany’s driver’s licence out of the post and using the personal information there, was able to access their phone and email accounts.

From there, things went from bad to worse for the new parents.

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Raphael and Tiffany realised something was wrong in August last year.

At the end of August, Raphael received a concerning notice from his superannuation fund.

“They said my password had changed, my details had changed, there was an attempt to access an early release.”

Luckily, he blocked the release but it made him wonder what else the hacker would try.

He decided to notify their accountant. It was tax time and the couple had not had a chance to complete their tax forms yet. Tiffany’s email was linked to the account.

But by then, it was too late.

Their identities were stolen while they were stuck in lockdown.

Raphael and Tiffany received a concerned call from their accountant explaining all their details had been changed and he had been removed from their ATO account.

“Luckily he [the accountant] managed to re-add himself to our account and saw they [the hacker] made a tax return claim with the hope of getting a return of $42,000 total,” Raphael. said.

Basically, the hacker had resubmitted tax documents spanning back years for both the husband and wife duo hoping to make off with a tidy profit.

“That was major tax fraud,” Raphael continued.

“If it wasn’t for our accountant, we probably never would have known. It was all a mess.”

Getting in touch with the ATO immediately, the couple were able to kick the hacker out of their accounts and added in an extra layer of security so that it can’t happen again.

“That’s some serious identity theft, it shocked us to our core,” the new father admitted.

“It’s quite anxiety-provoking. There’s definitely a sense of violation.”

Once a month, the scammer tries to steal Tiffany’s SIM card. Picture: Dave Hunt

The hacker even attempted to swap Tiffany’s SIM card — meaning that they would be in control of her phone number and able to intercept her text messages, including automated password reset texts, allowing them to take over more accounts.

Optus records seen by news.com.au show that the hacker has made three attempts to take over her phone, one as recently as last month.

The identity thief told Optus staff their phone and wallet had been stolen from their car so they needed a replacement SIM card.

“hi ive [sic] lost my device and i need a replacement simcard,” one of the hacker’s messages read to the Optus web chat service.

After the conversation continued for a bit, the Optus employee said: “Due to privacy issue we have stopped activating replacement SIM card online. Option to activate/order replacement sim is available only at Optus stores or with our voice team over call. This is because cyber criminals have been found to use these requests as an opportunity to gain access to personal information that doesn’t belong to them. This is the reason code was not received when you tried online.

“I‘ll provide our voice team number, can you call our team now who can help with sim replacement.”

Unsurprisingly, the hacker never contacted the voice team number to confirm their identity.

Tiffany has since changed her mobile number.

Still not over

Tiffany has been living without proper identification since February last year.

Her passport has expired and she is unable to be issued with a new licence until the police report concludes hers was indeed stolen.

Raphael and Tiffany filed a police report in September, detailing the extent of the identity theft.

They also provided the address of a home in the Melbourne suburb of Glen Iris, where the iPad and iPhone ordered on their accounts was delivered to.

However, police suspect the address is fake.

They were told the police investigation would take 12 weeks but are still waiting for a response. Tiffany has been left in limbo, unable to acquire any points of identification until the investigation ends.

When news.com.au contacted Victoria Police, it took several days for them to even find the Wong report in the system.

“On 3 September 2021 Victoria Police received a cyber report of an alleged incident involving the personal financial accounts of a Burwood man and woman being compromised in August 2021,” a spokesperson said.

“The report is currently being assessed.”