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Many Australians have either been scammed or tried to be—and there’s more to come.
Rob Heathcote, one of Australia’s most esteemed horse trainers, is living proof and has chosen to use his experience as a cautionary tale by going public with it in the hopes that no one else makes the same mistake. He was duped out of $100,000 when trying to buy a Mercedes-Benz for his wife.
For the rest of his life, the Brisbane-based trainer who was duped by a complex scam will beat himself up for not recognising it. As he recently said on Nine’s new Anatomy of a Scam podcast, he is still berating himself over this incident.
In December 2021, he made a down payment for the car but was informed that it may take longer than expected. Multiple emails were exchanged over several months.
“It was at that time that we ceased to communicate via phone, and it was pretty much exclusively done via email,” Rob Heathcote said.
“Sometime during that period, we don’t know exactly when, a hacker, a scammer intercepted emails from Mercedes-Benz to me, and ultimately from myself to Mercedes-Benz, and then started to play each of us other against each other, in an attempt to create the illusion that I was talking to Mercedes-Benz,” he added.
The malicious scam known as business email compromise has become a worrying reality in Australia and continues to spread. On the podcast, Australian Federal Police Commander Cybercrime Operations Chris Goldsmid illuminated that this phishing attack is becoming increasingly prevalent.
“One of the scam types that we are focused on is business email compromise, and that’s a particularly nefarious type of scam where criminals will compromise an email account and then use that email account to send legitimate-looking to try and trick people into sending payments to the wrong account,” Chris Goldsmid said.
Scams of this type are all too common in Australia, resulting in a collective loss that averages $50,000 per incident.
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