The Front Page: How much are scam artists costing Kiwis every year?

New Zealanders are being scammed at record levels. Photo / 123RF

You may not have personally gone through the awful experience of being scammed out of your life savings - but chances are someone you know may have.

Cyber scams are becoming increasingly costly for New Zealanders, with Kiwis losing $36 million in the last two years - $9m of which was lost in the last quarter, setting a new record for the biggest single quarterly loss.

NZ Herald reporter Lane Nichols has written dozens of stories about the growing problem in recent years. He told The Front Page that older people tend to be more ripe for scammers, and the sense of embarrassment that comes with falling for a scam can lead some to move on without reporting it.

“Most of the financial damage seems to be between $100 and $1000. And maybe if you’re embarrassed, you’re just willing to sort of write that off. And it’s only the really big, large ones that they’re more likely to come forward and report.”

It isn’t helping that some of the scams are becoming quite sophisticated. Recently, Nichols wrote about a pensioner in Invercargill who logged into his online banking and was surprised by what he discovered.

”[They] found that $134,000 had been moved around accounts and then transferred out to four separate banks in 11 transactions over five days. So once he realised that he reported to police and the bank, the bank looked into it, um, and they found out the scammers had somehow gone into his account.

“They knew his password, they knew his username. They then used a secure message function to pretend that they were him, talk to the bank, change his listed mobile phone number. So when the two-factor authentication check was done, they were able to circumvent that and move, move his money out of his account,” Nichols explained.

NZ Herald investigative reporter Matt Nippert earlier this year turned the tables on some scammers operating in New Zealand, who were using expertly photoshopped bank prospectuses to impersonate Westpac and CitiBank to target people looking to make investments.

Nippert managed to record one of the scam artists after baiting them to contact him, and grilled them for some time before revealing he was a journalist - and promptly being hung up on.

Nippet told The Front Page that these scams will continue as long as they can keep making money.

“What’s quite alarming is the case I looked at was quite highly targeted. So they were going after hundreds of thousands of dollars at a go, and you only need one in a hundred of those to be successful. Despite the obvious investment of time it takes for them to make multiple calls over multiple weeks, it clearly could be quite a profitable enterprise. Where there’s profits, there’s growth and longevity, isn’t there?”

Listen to the full podcast for more from Nichols and Nippert on what they’ve learned about scams in New Zealand and how to get their money back - plus, listen to Nippert’s conversation with a scammer after getting them on tape.