A north-east dad has had £16,000 stolen by fraudsters just a week before his young daughter’s birthday.
Brian McCarthy, who lives in Ferryhill, Aberdeen, was tricked while taking a phone call from someone purporting to work for his bank.
He was contacted by a scammer and asked to disable his online banking privileges by a “respectable sounding” fraudster who told the self-employed businessman that he would be phoned again.
After several hours passed without any follow-up, Mr McCarthy called the bank and quickly realised he had been targeted by scammers who made nine transactions throughout the day.
Now the 46-year-old, who has his own offshore supplies business, has had his accounts frozen and is in the hands of the bank’s fraud team.
A further bogus phone call to Mr McCarthy on Friday evening would almost certainly have led to further losses, but he twigged what was going on and refused to pass on a code which he received by text. He was shocked to find the phone call appeared to come from TSB, which led him to think the fraudster had hacked into the bank’s telephone network as well as his account.
TSB insisted last night that its phone system was secure.
The illicit activity came amid the continued fallout from TSB’s well-publicised IT meltdown, which left millions of customers unable to access online banking.
Mr McCarthy is the sole breadwinner in his household and provides for his partner and two girls. He was convinced the first call was genuine and said: “There has been so much on the news about TSB’s problems and I thought it was related to that.
“When I realised what had happened I nearly keeled over. My psoriasis also flared up.
“I’ve got my daughter’s ninth birthday coming next week. How am I supposed to buy her presents?”
Police confirmed that inquiries into Mr McCarthy’s case were ongoing.
Detective Sergeant Stuart Murray said: “A genuine bank or organisation will never contact you out of the blue to ask for your PIN, full password or to move money to another account.”
Last week a former police inspector forced TSB to reimburse him £2,500 stolen from his account, after staging a three-day sit in.
Charlie Sweeney, 53, from Largs in Ayrshire, spent three days at the branch trying to find out what happened to his money after hackers left him with just £20 in his account.
