A single mother from Melbourne lost all of her life savings after falling for a scam disguised as a job opportunity – and is now struggling to even feed her kids.
Melissa Anderson, 43, had taken two years off work to care for her young sons, aged one and two – a time that saw her split with her partner and struggle to pay the bills.
She started looking for work online on Facebook job boards, where she found what seemed like a simple cleaning job posted by someone named ‘Aurora O’Brien.’
After expressing interest, she was promptly contacted and asked to provide her phone number.
But instead of offering cleaning services, the company claimed it actually specialised in providing ‘positive reviews’ for BnB listings on a platform that closely resembled AirBnB.
Melissa’s prospective employer moved the conversation to the encrypted social media app Telegram and gave her ‘training’ that seemed like a real onboarding process.
The scammers taught her about the nature of the job, including how many homes she’d review in a batch, how to optimise and generate reviews, and how to leave a five-star score.
Ms Anderson then left reviews for ‘commissions,’ with the scammers depositing small amounts of money into the app.
Then the fraudsters informed her she’d need to deposit some money to make recommendations on ‘properties’ with higher payouts.
During these processes on their meticulously designed app and website, Ms Anderson had to sign in to her Commonwealth Bank and provide screenshots to prove to the scammers she was depositing the money.
‘I did a bank transfer, and then, at that moment, they had all of my details.’
She said she checked her account and saw the fraudsters had siphoned all the money from her accounts over the days she completed the tasks – and had lost more than $23,900.
‘They took money out and then held it to ransom. Saying give us more or you won’t see your money again.
‘It’s all a scam and of course you won’t see anything back from them.
‘To make matters worse, the scammers also took the balance of my credit card, so it’s negative, and I’m getting bills for the interest.
Ms Anderson said she was embarrassed to have fallen for the cruel scheme and reached out to only her closest friend for advice after she lost everything.
While they talked, her back pocket still buzzed with messages on the encrypted messaging platform Telegram.
‘They wanted more, they said “if you can’t get this amount, borrow from your friends, borrow from your family, you can sell your car, you can pawn gold jewellery”,’ Ms Anderson said.
She said the Commonwealth Bank has told her they were powerless to investigate the theft of her $23,900 as she had handed her information to the scammers.
But Ms Anderson has done her own digging into the scam.
She believes she traced the website to an office building in China and has since alerted every authority she can find, including the domain hosts.
When she checked back on the fraudulent website earlier in the week, however, she noticed everything on the website had been changed.
‘They do a lot of maintenance to make sure they don’t get caught. I’d like them to get stopped, but I don’t know how much work is involved.’
She even warned the scammers she was going to put a stop to them, and received a crushing reply.
‘I threatened to tell AirBnB; they said ‘Go ahead, we don’t care’; they obviously think they’re bullet-proof.’
Ms Anderson has slowly come to terms with the huge financial blow.
‘Once it’s gone, it’s gone, and in my heart, I know it’s not coming back, but I want to think they might give it back.
‘All I’m hoping is that no one does the same thing as me.’
Ms Anderson has started a GoFundMe page in an effort to recoup some of the money lost.
Commonwealth Bank has been contacted for comment.
