Canadians lose hundreds of millions to fraudsters each year — Can a new bank alliance prevent that?

financialpost.com:

Jan Martin always thought she was “careful enough” in handling potential scammers. The project manager in her mid-30s frequently changed her passwords and rarely picked up calls from unknown numbers. But her confidence levels took a hit last summer when she lost $3,000 to fraudsters in the space of just a few minutes.

Martin (her name has been changed to protect her identity) used her credit card to purchase flight tickets online for her mother one afternoon. An hour later, she received a text with a verification code from what she thought was her bank. That was immediately followed by an automated call that said the bank had “an important message” about her purchase and she needed to type in the verification code to listen to it.

She initially ignored the call and went back to work, but the phone wouldn’t stop ringing. After it rang for the fourth time, she excused herself from a meeting and answered the call because she was worried her bank hadn’t processed the transaction. After thinking about it for a while, she decided to follow the call’s instructions and type in the verification code.

“That was the mistake,” she said. “Usually, scam calls come once a day and I don’t pick up and that’s it. But they were repeatedly calling me, which made me think maybe there’s an issue with my purchase. Also, the calls and the text arrived after I bought the flight tickets; I thought this was a verification process. I was also in a hurry because I had to get back to my meeting.”

With the help of the verification code, the scammers, who somehow already had her card’s details, logged in to her account and stole $3,000. While she got her money back from the bank, she was astonished at how “convincing and powerful” scammers could be.

Ca