Scams and Cons

This week I had an email from the Metric Wealth HR Department. Apparently, I had $376 of underpayment due to me from the last tax year and a statement of this was attached to check.

This was very intriguing, especially as I don’t have an HR department.

Now as scams go, this one was reasonably obvious, but had it come through to me while working in a bigger organisation, it was glossy enough to attract a casual click.

Who knows what was in that attachment but its now off into the trash.

Pandemic conditions, especially with the multitude of cash payments from welfare and governments are seeing an increasing number of sophisticated scams popping up.

Last year, Australian’s lost $851 million dollars to scammers – a record amount. (Although still not a patch on Australia’s not so proud gambling losses - $24 billion. An unwanted world record.)

Those with Supers and investments (which is most of you reading this) are prime targets.

In a financial planner discussion forum (yes, such places exist for us to discuss exciting trends like Division 293 taxation notices) another planner shared the below, that his client had been sent. Using imagery from a genuine brochure by reputable fund manager Vanguard, they’d created a fake fixed interest account paying over 7% per annum. Who wouldn’t want that in a low interest world?

No matter how high our email security settings, we will all get a few slip through.

If you get something that’s borderline and you’re not sure, then call me – we’ll quickly do a screen share and look at it together (please don’t forward it!)

Financial advisers have a highly tuned scam detection radar, we’re naturally cautious people as we’ve had many dubious pitches to us over the years I was once pitched a fund that invested in a scheme run by Bernie Madoff. I sidestepped that although the returns looked amazing.

If it seems too good to be true – it probably is.