Scammer pretending to be Monzo fraud department

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1

Hi,

Just wanted to raise awareness about what has happened to me today or if anyone from Monzo can help. I feel quite sick and normally can see a scammer a mile off but not this time.

This morning at 10:54 I received a call from a private number claiming to be Monzo and asking me if I had just made a purchase from Groupon for 34 pounds which I said no, checked my account and they instantly reimbursed the money.

They then asked me to look through my previous transactions to see if there were any card checks or transactions that looked suspicious and I said no, nothing other than Groupon.

They said they are going to try and do some safety checks on my account and that I may be logged out of Monzo at the end of the call. They then generated an email that is legitimately from Monzo, I can spot a spam email, I checked the full email address and it was legit. I do not know how they managed this, the only thing I can think of is putting my email to trigger some sort of reset. They also told me they could see two devices logged in and asked me to confirm whether I was the Android device which I confirmed. Asked me if my address is still my address (they read out my address to me at this point), it all seemed very convincing.

This is when I should have been smarter and realised something was wrong. They said to make my money safe I should remove my money from pots and leave it in my personal account. So I did that. Then they said they need to remove all current pending transactions and in order to do this I need to approve them and they would instantly reimburse the money. At this point I actually said how do I know this is legit and they said we appreciate you being concerned but we have triggered emails and texts directly to you and reimbursed the money from Groupon. They also triggered a code from Monzo which they said I will need to enter after the transaction. Again a legitimate text as this was in a chain of messages I had previously received from Monzo. So I approved the payment for over 1k :woman_facepalming:.

They then said I need to refer you to my line manager to help you get your account safe, hung up and rung me back, asking on my joint account to take the same steps at which point I said no, I am going to ring back Monzo directly to which they said of course we understand. Then I rung Monzo and heard the automated message to say we will never phone you about fraud and my heart sank, realising I had just given over 1k of my money to a scammer.

Iā€™ve since got through to someone on the phone who referred me to the app and answered the questions and a specialist is looking into it. I feel absolutely terrible Iā€™ve fell victim to one of these scams and since been researching about other people who have had similar situations and read that Monzo is one of the lowest in a league table of banks for reimbursing after fraud.

Iā€™m just hoping Iā€™ll get it back.

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2

Hi. Welcome.

Two important things first

  1. Do not blame yourself. This is very far from the idea that these scammers sound like ā€œello, I call from bankā€

  2. Youā€™ll very likely get that money back.

Was the email from Monzo with your ā€œmagic linkā€ if you know the email address, this is easily done, I could trigger this now.

Text messages are very easy to spoof.

The Groupon part, if they try your card details, they know youā€™ll get that the notification to approve it, so itā€™s easy to tell you that, knowing youā€™ll see it. They are incredibly smart, very sophisticated and thatā€™s what makes it so hard to convince people to not trust them.

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3

Also for future reference, you can see if you are on the phone to Monzo.

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4

Thank you for your response. Yes it was the magic link but I never clicked it. They asked me to click the link at the end of the call but because my money didnā€™t instantly go back into my account I realised something was wrong by then.

What I now realise they actually made he Groupon purchase 1 minute into the call but when I answered I didnā€™t have my banking open and I donā€™t have push notifications for every transaction.

I think I was just very naive and like you said these scams have got a lot more sophisticated than the obvious phishing emails with pixelated images, typos etc.

I suppose if anything good has come from this is that Iā€™ve been researching all weekend about scams
(I posted this originally on Friday but just been approved) so I know what to look out for and protect myself in the future.

5

Thanks, this is a great feature. When I got through to real Monzo on the phone they made me aware of this. Will keep this in mind in future.

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6

I had exactly the same scam and an almost identical experience. They are VERY good and convincing. A little voice in my head prevented me from clicking ā€˜acceptā€™ for Ā£3k. I felt sick even though I didnā€™t make the transaction. They seemed to know a lot about my personal details.

7

Thank you for sharing your story. You prevented my wife from a similar situation. She brought her phone to me to let me listen in, and everything sounded a bit odd. I questioned ā€œMark Douglasā€ who I couldnā€™t find online anywhere and he got more frustrated the more questions we asked.

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