‘I never thought I would be tricked like this!’: Maxime was robbed of 8,000 euros with a very well-crafted telephone scam

It all started with a phone call. Maxime picks up, and at the end of the line, he is told that it is Amazon customer service. They would have spotted fraudulent transactions on his account. The person on the phone is very reassuring: “It was a lady who spoke very good English, and who begins by asking me a series of questions: have you connected to a public WiFi network these days? spotted a virus (malware) on your computer? It was all right and the distrust was gradually moving away and trust was building”, explains Maxim. Everything seems real, the conversation is courteous, the checks take time and seem very professional, the information corresponds to Maxime’s experience. What’s more, a colleague of the lady, supposedly from Amazon’s anti-fraud department, intervenes and gives a series of personal information about Maxime: “For example, the last four numbers of my bank cards. Information that only customer service could know. My private address as well. I, of course, asked questions to be sure that they are indeed part of Amazon And then they asked me to go to a website that listed a series of transactions that had effectively been blocked by their system. All the suspicions, all the doubts, that I may have had, each time they had a credible answer. From the moment this confidence was installed, it is true that I followed the instructions that were given to me.”