2023-09-11 17:40:00
Bjorn De Schoenmaeker, a 36-year-old Belgian from Puurs-Sint-Amands, Flanders, and a fruit merchant by profession, was the victim of a scam last week. In the columns of Nieuwsblad, he explains how a scammer managed to have him transfer 5,000 euros by telephone.
“I’m not the naive type, I always check our accounts very meticulously. And yet, it happened to me,” confides the thirty-year-old. Manager of the “Vegefruit” store for more than ten years, Bjorn had recently changed his account number. It was last Monday that he received a phone call from a man introducing himself as an employee of an umbrella organization. “The service was supposed to handle suspicious transactions,” explains Bjorn. “The man on the line asked me if I had made a deposit into an account in Romania. This was obviously not the case and this is how he wanted to gain my trust. Everything seemed real,” he adds.
Suspicious, Bjorn asked his interlocutor to provide him with proof that he was speaking to someone from the bank. The scammer then suggested he check the phone number he was calling with online. The fraudster then directed Bjorn to his bank’s supposed website. “The employee asked me a number of questions to make sure I was the right person. It asked me to install a program. I ended up transferring 4,982 euros,” adds Bjorn.
“I lost my hard-earned money”
It was only afterwards that the Belgian wondered if he had done something stupid. He went to his bank in Willebroek, where all his accounts were blocked. “The employee did everything to find the money,” explains Bjorn. “Eventually it turned out that the money had already been diverted to another account abroad. For the bank, that closed the case and I lost my hard-earned money,” laments Bjorn.
The vegetable seller would have liked more understanding from his bank. “Banks want citizens to do things digitally as much as possible. That’s great, but how protected are we yet? At the end of the day, no one takes responsibility. I think the big banks are doing too well. We have to pay for everything, but we are not protected,” Bjorn despairs.
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#naive #type #real