A YOUNG woman lost £20,000 buying her dream car in a cunning scam.
Georgina Smith, 25, missed a key detail while trying to pay a deposit for a Mercedes Benz and sent thousands of pounds to a scammer.
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While driving to pick up the new car she received a call from the Mercedes dealership saying her deposit had not been paid.
But she had been sent an email invoice seemingly from them weeks before – asking for the £20,000 payment.
After asking for a copy of their invoice to check the information, Smith noticed that the payment details were not the same.
The “redirection” scammers had expertly copied everything in Mercedes’ communication.
The format, style and information on the fake invoice was exactly the same as the original.
Except for the bank account numbers.
Smith, who lives in Australia, told 7news that she had bought a different car from the same dealership the year before and was used to dealing with them.
So she hadn’t suspected anything out of the ordinary when the invoice arrived.
“The process for me was exactly the same,” Smith said.
“The invoice was the same, I dealt with the same people at Mercedes, so everything seemed to check out the same way (it) did the year prior.”
The 25-year-old went on to say Mercedes had denied any responsibility for the scam – blaming her almost immediately.
She said: “I think this is the part that makes me the most angry is that initially, they blamed me almost instantly, which I thought was quite strange.
“They weren’t very apologetic from the beginning or throughout the whole thing at all.”
She even hired tech gurus to check her servers – who found they had not been tampered with.
Smith, who owns her own business, said she bought the car through her company and added:
“I (deal with) large transactions every day. If a hacker was waiting and intercepting my emails, my clients would have money missing and they don’t.”
In the end she was not able to get any of her money back, and paid almost £50,000 to buy the car.
She has vowed never to buy from Mercedes again, claiming their system was compromised.
Redirection scammers work by hacking into company databases, copying legitimate invoices and changing the bank details before sending them to customers.
Shockingly between January 1 this year and September 30, government anti-scamming organisation Scamwatch was sent almost 1,000 reports of similar schemes.
Businesses who filed the reports apparently totalled a loss of almost £7 million.
A spokesperson for Mercedes-Benz Australia said their systems were not compromised, and that they take cyber security very seriously.
“Sadly, the issue of invoice fraud is not unique to our brand or our industry,” they said.
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“It is a risk whenever there is an exchange of financial information online. To mitigate this risk, we are continuously evolving security measures to make online payments safer.
“We also urge our customers to be vigilant by ensuring an email or invoice purporting to be from a retailer is legitimate by calling the retailer to confirm it is genuine and any account details are accurate.”
