A NSW man has outwitted a con artist attempting to get his hands on a NAB customer’s bank details

An Australian man has captured the moment a scammer lost his cool while trying to access the man’s bank details.

The moment a scammer lost his cool when his phishing scam failed to fool a quick thinking NAB customer has been caught on camera.

When NSW man Ray picked up the phone to a con artist attempting to impersonate a bank employee, he saw the red flags immediately.

“He sent me a text message with a link and he wanted me to open the text,” Ray said.

“I said to him, ‘no, I’m not going to open this text until I get confirmation from NAB’ because I wasn’t just going to open a random text from someone calling off a private number.

“It was a man with a British accent. He said everything you expect NAB would say but he called me off a private number. He had an excuse for that. He had an excuse for everything.

“I told him I wasn’t going to open the text and he was getting irritated. When he started getting irritated, I knew this guy was a scammer.”

When Ray realised the phone call was a scam he asked his wife to capture the interaction on camera. Picture: NAB

But Ray’s ability to outsmart the criminal prompted a surprising outburst from the man who hung up the phone with an explicit goodbye message.

“OK, f*** yourself, love you, bye bye,” the man abruptly said.

NAB executive for group investigations and national fraud Chris Sheehan said the recording highlighted the warning signs Australians should be aware of.

“Ray did the right thing. NAB will never call you and ask you to share your one-time PIN, transfer money to another account to keep it safe, give us remote access to your devices or provide personal information like your driver’s licence details,” Mr Sheehan, who is also a former Australian Federal Police executive, said.

“Criminals are masters at being insistent and pushy to create a sense of fear or urgency.

“Their goal is to pressure the person to make the payment themselves or share personal details, such as log in details or one-time passcodes.

NAB executive for group investigations and national fraud Chris Sheehan said the company would never request a one-time PIN from customers. Picture: Supplied

“If you aren’t sure if it is NAB calling you, hang up and call the bank yourself using the number on the back of your card or via searching it on our public website.”

Despite a bank-wide strategy at NAB to help reduce the number of Australians falling victim to scams, Mr Sheehan said the global epidemic cost Australians more than $3bn in 2022.

“While phone phishing remains an issue, we have seen a 77 per cent reduction in cases when comparing October to December 2023 to October to December 2022,” he said.

“We worked with telecommunications providers to put protections in place to make it harder for criminals to impersonate bank phone numbers and infiltrate legitimate text message threads.

“This means that scam calls may appear as an unknown number or no caller ID, like in Ray’s case, whereas previously they might have appeared to come from a legitimate bank number.

“NAB has also removed links from text messages we send customers to make it easier to identify when a message is legitimate. Text messages are the biggest front door to phishing scams.”

Originally published as A NSW man has outwitted a con artist attempting to get his hands on a NAB customer’s bank details