A Different View with Dave O’Connell

It might have been a Bank Holiday Monday, but the scammers were still working flat-out – and thankfully so were the security staff and fraud unit at AIB itself.

Because I fell hook, line and sinker for what I now know was a very elaborate scam, although thankfully the only penalty was having to spend the last week without credit or debit cards.

What lifted this above the normal phishing exercise was that the first point of contact was a message from a number normally used by AIB to tell me that my monthly credit card statement is now available to view online.

So when a text dropped in from this AIB number to tell me that a new device had been set up successfully, adding: “if this was not you contact us immediately on 1800852602’.

Which I did, because I had no reason to suspect it wasn’t from the vigilant team at AIB.

The phone call led me through the usual rigmarole when you dial a business – ‘press one for this, press two for that’ – and then a very helpful man with a Dublin accent appeared on the line to help me out of my predicament.

Or, as it transpired, to help me out of my money.

What made this even more credible is that, after asking me if I’d made two purchases at named electrical outlets in Galway that morning – which I hadn’t – he asked me if I’d used my card the day before in a named pub.

I had; we’d been out for lunch. And then he asked me if I’d used it in a named petrol station the previous day. Again, I had, and he quoted the amount I’d paid for petrol. Just for good measure, he told me where I was for lunch on the previous Thursday.

I’d been down this road for real before, only the last time it was someone who used my number for a supermarket shop in Australia; no harm done then because the transaction was declined although, again, I ended up without cards for about a week.

So because, like the half the country, I’d been phished before, rather than suspect that he was setting me up for a fall, I thanked my scammer profusely and admitted my embarrassment that I’d been caught – when all the while, not realising that I was actually getting caught now.

But it was all so plausible…an AIB number, an Irish accent, an intimate knowledge of my legitimate transactions.