It took this Townsville mum a decade to save a house deposit...and only minutes to lose it: The scam to watch out for

A Queensland mother is urging locals to be aware of sophisticated scammers appearing as legitimate bank employees.

Townsville woman Shannon Saunders lost nearly $50,000 to a person who claimed to be helping save her money.

WATCH THE VIDEO ABOVE: Queensland mum loses house deposit through sophisticated scam

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Saunders, a mother of four, has been saving what she could while renting for the past nine years. That money was lost in an instant.

The scammers stole $48,688.70 from her.

“My account was left at zero balance,” she said.

“Then the phone went dead.”

When someone called her claiming to be part of the fraud department, saying there was suspicious activity on her account, the childcare worker was initially apprehensive.

She logged into her Suncorp bank account, then became concerned the potential scammers could have access to her details, so began the process of changing her account details.

Saunders then received a text from a number from which she had previously received Suncorp messages regarding information such as security codes on.

The text told her not to proceed any further with the call until the operator gave her a secure code, which was included in the messages.

“I thought, ‘Okay this must be legit’,” she said.

It was all part of an elaborate scam in which fraudsters can appear as if they’re calling from a company.

The man on the phone, who Saunders believed at the time to be a Suncorp staff member, told her there were three transactions being blocked on her account.

“I proceeded to tell him a couple of times that I was concerned about the legitimacy of the call,” she said. “He reassured me that he was there to keep my money safe.”

“It was a 38-minute conversation that I had with this gentleman, it was not a quick conversation.

“The whole time I said to him how sick I was feeling about my money not being secure.”

Saunders was then told staff members were creating a new account for her as fraudsters had access to her account.

“He said in the background he and a team member were working to create the new account (and) in the meantime, I was going to be sent a text message with secure account details that I needed to transfer the money into.

The penny drops

She told the man on the phone once more how uncomfortable she was and he reassured her.

“He’d done all the authenticating things he needed to do,” she said.

Saunders then transferred the money into the new “secure account”.

“My account was sitting at zero and then the phone went dead,” she said.

That’s when the penny dropped for her.

“I immediately went into shock, my hands were shaking and I felt physically sick.”

Talking to the real Suncorp

Saunders then called Suncorp’s 13 number, and got onto someone who actually worked there.

“(They said) that this transfer had been flagged and I immediately just started screaming down the phone ‘stop, stop it now, it’s not a transaction that needs to go ahead’.”

She was told that the money had been transferred into a Commonwealth bank account and that staff were trying to get on to Commonwealth to freeze the account.

Eventually she was told the money had been immediately transferred out of the new account.

The scam lost Saunders her house deposit.

“That was a house deposit and savings for a house due to settle in the following week,” Saunders said.

Thanks to family support Saunders is still able to go ahead with the purchase of her new home.

“If we didn’t have the family support, I don’t even want to think about where we would be,” she said.

Saunders said the entire experience was traumatic and has left her scarred.

“The day we had to transfer over the deposit for the house into our solicitor’s trust fund, I was physically sick,” she said.

“I went into the branch to transfer it because I can’t log in to my phone banking. I can’t look at the transaction that’s happened.

“Until I got the email notification from our solicitor that they’d received the funds the next day I didn’t sleep.

“I feel so vulnerable and violated.”

Authorities aware of scam

ScamWatch says it is aware of spoof calls and texts and is urging locals not to share any personal information over the phone.

Suncorp Bank says they will never ask for customer passwords over the phone and while they do try to recover funds moved to other banks it is not always possible.

Saunders has taken her matter to the Financial Complaints Authority.

“I was 100 per cent under the presumption that I was doing this under the instructions of a Suncorp team member.”

A warning to others

Saunders said she just doesn’t want anyone else to fall victim to the “sophisticated scam”.

“I had no question in my mind that I was being guided by a professional from Suncorp, telling me this is what I needed to do to keep my money safe,” she said.

“I don’t want anybody else to feel the way that I’m feeling, the way that my family is feeling.”

Saunders wants to share her story as seeing warnings about it may have made her even a little bit more suspicious and she may not have gone through with it.

“Maybe one person that gets that phone call from Suncorp will hang the phone up and it won’t happen to them,” she said.

“If that’s all that I get from this then that’s better than somebody else falling victim to it.”

-with Lawrence Jeffcoat