‘I was embarrassed’: Ottawa woman warns others of the threat of e-transfer scams

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Kimberley Bray wants others to know how easy it can be to fall victim to an e-transfer scam. The Ottawa woman is warning about scammers gaining access to your banking information and transferring money out of your account.

“I felt ashamed, I was embarrassed,” Bray said.

“But then I watched a few videos of this happening, and I did some reading, and I thought, I can’t be the only person this has happened to.”

Earlier this fall, Bray was about to sell a blouse on the online marketplace platform Poshmark when she received an email from outside the platform. The email was about the blouse with a link to receive an e-transfer. After she clicked the link, she received a text message from the bank notifying her that a transfer for $1,000 was complete and another one was underway.

“I was like, alright, wait a minute, I’m supposed to be getting the e-transfer for $30, not giving away one for a thousand,” Bray told CTV News Ottawa.

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The email was from a scammer sending a phishing link to gain access to her personal information and bank account.

“It doesn’t make a difference what age you are, what your job is, how smart you think you are,” Bray said.

“These scammers — they have a process that they’ve gone through to check all the boxes. And once they feel like they have you, they are going to take advantage, and you will be victimized.”

Anti-fraud consultant Vanessa Iafolla says these types of scams are becoming more common.

“It’s pretty common, it’s something that I see a lot of, and goes hand in hand with phishing experiences,” Iafolla said.

“People who inadvertently click links and then, all of a sudden, their bank account information is compromised, and then that money just gets transferred out of their account and it’s gone.”

Iafolla warns this can be an easy target for scammers.

“All it really requires is for you to click a link that you’re not supposed to be clicking, or rather, that the scammer wants you to link,” Iafolla said in an interview with CTV News Ottawa.

She suggests platforms like Poshmark need to do a better job of protecting consumers.

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“It’s a system-wide issue. The platform, it should be more responsible about who it lets on. It should be detecting people and booting them off if they’re just scamming and spamming,” Iafolla said.

“Certainly, it’s important for banks to build really robust fraud systems and detect these things before they happen, before the money’s gone,” she said.

“And I think it’s also important for our telecommunications companies and our regulators to realize that these scams are coming through our phones, they’re coming through our computers, and they have a really important role to play in stopping them, in stopping spammers and scammers from getting access to us in the first place.”

Iafolla’s advice is, “The second something feels off, cut off that access.”

“Hang up the phone, don’t continue. And if you see more information coming through by a text message. Or if you have more calls, don’t pick up. Because once you pick up, they know the line is alive and they will just keep coming at you,” Iafolla said.

In a statement to CTV News, Poshmark says in part that it “does not display personal information and will never share it with another user, as doing so would violate our privacy policy.

“Poshmark does not support offline transactions, payments, or communication outside of our platform. … If you receive a phishing email, always forward suspicious emails to [e-mail] and delete them.”

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