Bank courier imposters cheat an 83-year-old cancer patient out of money and a PIN

Shaun Moore, 22, and Jevon Grant, 20, were sentenced to 18 months imprisonment and two years in a young offenders' institution for defrauding victims of about $33,000 in a scheme involving phone calls and in-person robbery.

"The scam worked by one of them calling the victim and claiming to be from their bank," a Met Police statement on the case explains. "They would convince the victim that their bank cards were at risk and would persuade them to hand them over to a ‘courier’ that would be acting on behalf of the bank. The pair would then get hold of the cards and PIN codes and steal money from their victims' accounts."

The pair admitted targeting vulnerable adults during police questioning, including a senior citizen suffering from cancer.  

Bank courier scams typically rely on feats of social engineering and a telephone system feature that is largely unknown to the general public

A con artist will cold call you on a landline, claiming to be from your bank or the police. The criminal states the organization’s systems have spotted a fraudulent payment on your card or it is due to expire and needs to be replaced.

In order to reassure that the call is genuine, the swindler suggests that you hang up and ring the bank/police back straight away. However, the scammer does not disconnect the call from the landline so that when you dial the real phone number, you are actually still speaking to the crook.

ThreatWatch is a regularly updated catalog of data breaches successfully striking every sector of the globe, as reported by journalists, researchers and the victims themselves.