70-year-old was about to lose millions to scam—until a bank teller's one simple question changed her life
Online scams are spreading their tendrils across the globe and people are increasingly falling prey to scammers, eventually losing their hard-earned wealth. An elderly lady from Liverpool, Australia, was about to fall victim to an online scam had a bank employee not intervened. According to the reports of 9 News Australia, Westpac Bank teller Marlena Karbowski was working at her desk when a customer arrived at the branch.
The elderly lady told Karbowski that she was there to cancel her home insurance and was planning to sell it instead. Karbowski could tell that something was off about the woman as she appeared nervous. So the bank teller started asking the woman a series of questions. "I asked, 'Why are you selling?' She was a little bit nervous, she said, 'I have to sell, I have to help my son'," Karbowski recalled to the news outlet. Then Karbowski invited the lady into her office and continued asking some personal questions to figure out the whole situation.
It turned out that the woman had initially lied and she was trying to draw money to help her boyfriend who claimed that he was in a foreign prison. "My next question was, 'Please tell me the last time he took you out for a coffee' and she said, 'Actually, never, we met online.'" That was when Karbowski knew that the woman was about to lose her belongings to a scammer. The woman handed over some pictures of her boyfriend to Karbowski and she ran them through Google's reverse image search.
"All the photos she received were online but with different names," Karbowski mentioned, confirming her suspicions. "We cried together and I walked her to the police station to report it." Westpac Bank continued to implement a better system to detect fraud and scam payments that were made through online transactions. Ben Young, the head of Fraud and Financial Crime Insights at the Westpac Bank, revealed on 9 News Australia that they had trained their employees to engage in investigative conversations with people who attempt to make suspicious transactions.
"You try to bottle up magic like Marlena's training in a human being and put that in a digital experience," Young explained. He introduced a new feature associated with online banking where AI helped prevent transferring funds to scam accounts. A feature called SaferPay was introduced to tighten the safety measures surrounding online transactions. The feature not only uses artificial intelligence to identify high-risk transactions but it helps to prevent customers of the bank from transferring huge funds to scam accounts.
"This is a real digital conversation, it asks the sort of questions you might ask if you spoke to a loved one and they said, I'm about to send $50,000 to some foreign corner of the world. Who is this person? How did you come across them?" Young explained. As for Karbowski, helping out individuals was not just a part of her job. Her own father had lost everything to an online scam at one point and she had no desire to let others suffer the same fate. "We care and when we see those red flags, we act," she told the news outlet.