SEMINOLE, Fla. — Seminole resident Ron Bharath could not figure out what was happening. On June 6, junk emails began flooding his inbox.
”It just got to be more and more and more. I was like, wait a minute, something's wrong,” Bharath told ABC Action News.
At first, he wasn’t overly concerned. “I thought maybe a hacker got into my email, and it just tried to play a prank on me,” he said about the 3,200 emails he received that day.
But Bharath discovered something more sinister than a prank when hours later, his bank texted him about an $800 withdrawal. After checking his bank account, he found a hacker had made 18 debits totaling $4,600 and wiped out his checking account.
He called Chase right away to report the issue.
Cyber security expert Keyaan Williams said criminals use what's known as email bombing as a distraction.
“You receive so many emails in a short amount of time you don't notice the very important message that comes across that authorizes a bank transaction or shows that you're logging in from another device,” Williams said.
Bharath said he filed a fraud report with the bank, but Chase denied the claim telling him that the "transactions were initiated on a known device.”
A PayPal look-alike made all of the debits but did not use the PayPal app. Bharath filed a complaint with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The banking regulatory agency found PayPal was not involved leaving this victim with nowhere to turn.
ABC Action News contacted Chase about the case. A spokesperson told us in an email: “I checked in with our executive office. They are still looking into this case for Mr. Bharath.”
Williams said the thieves in these types of cases may have obtained victims’ information from a data breach. “If the criminals have access to your email account, they receive the confirmation, and then they can perform malicious transactions pretending to be you.”
Here are some things you can do to protect yourself from this type of fraud:
- Contact your bank to see what security tools they offer customers
- Use strong passwords
- Use different passwords on accounts
- Set up 2-factor authentication
- Never ignore emails from your bank
- Sign up for a credit monitoring service
