Carlton’s Jacob Weitering falls victim to elaborate banking scam

An AFL star has come forward and opened up after falling victim to an elaborate bank scam that cost him his entire life savings.

Carlton vice-captain Jacob Weitering has fallen victim to a sophisticated and elaborate bank scam that has cost him his life savings.

The 25-year-old has come forward in an attempt to try and help others from becoming potential future victims to the scam.

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The defender and former number one draft pick detailed the devastating events that ultimately led to his life savings disappearing.

Across multiple days the star thought he was communicating with his bank, only for it to be revealed he was dealing with elaborate scammers.

It all started late last year when the 137-game player received a text message notifying him of suspicious activity on his account which appeared in a thread of messages from National Australia Bank.

“I remember it being a Friday. So I wanted to get onto it pretty fast as I didn’t want my accounts to be drained over the weekend,” he said in an exclusive interview with the Herald Sun.

The scammers’ elaborate plan then turned to phone calls which appeared on his phone as the NAB fraud line.

They were so convincing that Weitering fell for the trap, believing his accounts had been frozen and his money needed to be moved into a “safeguarding account”.

Read the full exclusive Weitering interview with the Herald Sun here

Weitering fell victim to the elaborate scam. (Photo by Dylan Burns/AFL Photos via Getty Images)

Over the course of the next week the Carlton star deposited funds into the account he thought was safe, emptying his accounts in the process.

“I sent them the money ­directly,” Weitering said.

“That was the biggest mistake that I made, and that was built off the perfect role-playing at their end.

“We cleared all the ­accounts until they were empty, into what I thought was a safe account.”

After learning of his mistake, the defender was left devastated with the large sum of money completely gone and impacting his family plans.

But in attempts to help others, Weitering sat down with NAB CEO Ross McEwan to record a video to help educate people about scams.

“It’s hard to imagine how sophisticated they are, at every step of the process,” Weitering said.

“I felt I needed to (speak out about being a victim).”

The video was made available to 30,000 NAB staff on Monday.

The scam left the footy star devastated. Picture by Michael Klein

Weitering isn’t the first and sadly he won’t be the last to fall victim to elaborate scammers with more than a dozen customers losing anywhere between $4000 and $80,000 each.

Eve* and her husband Josh* are one couple who fell for the scam, losing almost $20,000 – money they had saved running their largely tourist-based business in Far North Queensland, which was badly hit by the pandemic.

“This was the first year things are going right and we tried to save as much money as we could and we were working seven days a week without a day off, 12 hours a day, without a break since Easter and then this happens,” Eve told news.com.au.

A Facebook group created by one of the people scammed discovered multiple NAB customers across Australia scammed in November and December alone – with at least 14 other victims coming forward.

Most of the victims’ experiences started with a text message that appeared to be from NAB, which said there had been fraudulent activity on their account and asked them to call the number back immediately.

Others received a text message that a payment had been declined and urged them to contact the bank if they had not made the transaction.

All the texts appeared in the same thread as other correspondence from the bank, which led the customers to believe the message was genuine and lulled them into a false sense of security.