In the 25 years Helen Cahill has kept the books for her small business near Melbourne Airport, she's never had any trouble doing online banking.There have been more than 35,000 reported attempts to gain the personal information of Australians since JanuarySo on a particularly busy afternoon on May 26, when she sat down at her desk, she thought it was strange it was taking so long to log in.
They were able to go back through the steps Ms Cahill took and uncovered the site had a phoney URL that was easy to miss in a hurry, referring to "bendigohank'" instead of "bendigobank"."My takeaway message would be: This can happen to anyone." "I just do not understand how … the bank didn't know about it. I think something needs to happen with Google, that they can run these ads."Bendigo Bank said in a statement that after the ad was discovered its "Financial Crimes team alerted the owner of the platform and had the fraudulent advertisement taken down".
A popular method used by scammers is what's known as "phishing", where things like an email imitating a bank or telco are used to encourage people to share their personal information."So smishing is via SMS and phishing more generally is via email or telephone," Mr Lacy said.One of the leaders of a group involved in a prolific scam operation was jailed in May after duping dozens of Australians when large swathes of the population were in COVID-19 lockdown in 2020.
Moral of the story - use ad blockers and never click on ad links
The link in the screenshot you're highlighting clearly says Bendigo Bank..?
Never do business with Bendigo Hank, he can’t be trusted.