Please help. I will try to recap as best I can as we are hoping to not have our life savings stolen.
My BF who owns a successful medical practice had his Bank of America account hacked yesterday exactly one hour after we left the bank to ask for a cashier's check for a down payment on a house (the down payment was around 500K as the market in NJ is absolutely insane right now). This left his account with around 500K remaining which will obviously be needed to close on this house in the next couple of months, renovate, buy furniture, etc. Here's how it started.
- We get home and he gets a text alert and e-mail alert that someone has logged into his account from another device.
- He logs in and finds that someone has changed the primary phone number, e-mail, and address to one of their own while deleting his. He decides to change it back and delete theirs while frantically calling the fraud department at BofA.
- We also notice that the hacker somehow had Secure Transfer USB enabled which was a feature not even he had on his own account. The hacker is actively changing back the information (phone, address, etc.) while my boyfriend is putting in his information.
- No money taken at this point but over the course of a couple hours through the phone they seem to secure but lock down his account (freeze it?) and only answer customer service for my BF's cell phone number.
- (Big question number one) We get an email at 11:20 P.M. last night saying that the account balance is 0 dollars and 0 cents. We call the 24 hour BofA hotline and they confirm that the money is still there but that it is only saying there is no money while they are freezing the account. *** Is it supposed to say "Your available account balance is Low" when you have a freeze?
- He goes to the same BofA in the morning first thing to confirm everything and runs into the same bank teller who helped us out with the cashier's check. This person was the only one who would have access to the SSN and other information. My Bf felt that she seemed somewhat suspicious for a variety of reasons.
- She greeted him with "back so soon? is everything all right?" or something to the effect, almost anticipating a problem.
- He starts to explain what happens and she takes him from the bank teller line into a private booth area. She gives him a written phone number to call for the fraud hotline. The number ends up being somewhat suspicious for a couple of reasons.
- He ends up calling the number on his morning commute as he had appointments to go to shortly after and couldn't stay. The person on the phone claims that all of the money is gone and has been transferred to another account. Bf contests this and says no that can't be, I was told it was just a freeze, etc. He is put on hold for a while to grab a supervisor and there is no hold music whatsoever, just blank sound. The supervisor takes over and basically claims that they can't identify where the money has gone but that he would need to call the claims department. They didn't redirect him to the claims department but had him call the claims department himself which was odd considering how he had been on the phone for 3 hours the day before and they were redirecting him left and right through the Bank of America customer support system (with music playing mind you).
- He calls the claims department and they say that the money is still there (????) and that the money is simply being locked or frozen (I am trying to tell this secondhand as I didn't hear this part). So this confuses him even more because why would he be told that it has been transferred to an account by one representative and then told it's secure in another? Second big question is, can 500K be transferred that easily?? We wrote a cashier's check for this amount so I worry that it actually can be taken by a fraudster in one fell swoop.
- We look up the number that was given to us online and can't find any online association with BofA. I would post the number here if I am allowed to. Tomorrow we are going to a different BofA branch to ask them about this number and its legitimacy as we are worried that the bank teller may be in on this as we got to reading about bank teller fraud tactics.
- An interesting factor with the number that was given by the teller was that they DID ask for two factor authentication, but I've read online there are ways to trick the person into giving up the authentication code by prompting the text message, and asking the person for the code.
- The person from the fraud hotline claimed that someone had tried to call and pretend they were my BF at around 3:50 P.M. the day before but were shut down due to coming across as suspicious. This at first seemed reassuring but in hindsight I wonder if they were making this up to gain trust?
We are extremely worried that we are about to lose 500K in his life savings through some kind of Zelle or bank teller fraud scam which was collected into an account for the sole purpose of having buying power in a difficult housing market.
We have taken all kinds of steps to try to get control of the situation but we worry that when we check back on this money its going to be gone or transferred away and they aren't going to have any way to give the money back because its not credit. We have filed a police report and were probably going to file with the FBI tomorrow as well. If you guys have any tips for this circumstance or wish to help out in providing any kind of advice on how this could happen and what level of risk we are at, we would greatly appreciate it.
Submitted April 15, 2022 at 03:12AM by Radibles https://ift.tt/D9mgPSq
