For 30 years Neil* worked as a senior executive at a large banking group, undergoing regular training on fraud prevention. But a WhatsApp message that arrived when he was distracted at a wedding bypassed his years of financial expertise and cost him £3,000.
Neil’s daughter, Alice, had moved to Australia a few days before and she was looking for a flat to rent. In a video call with her dad, Alice had explained that she was trying to sort out her finances and might need to get a new phone. She told him she might also need to borrow money for a flat deposit over the next few days, as it would cost her too much in fees to send it from her own bank account, which was based in Thailand.
The next day Neil, 62, and his wife were at a wedding in Scotland when he got a text: “Hi Dad, it’s me. This is my new number.”
Because of the previous call with Alice, he thought nothing of it. He replied, and the scammer asked to borrow £3,000. Neil said: “I thought that sounds about right for a deposit on the flat. And I’d had this conversation with my daughter just 24 hours before. Timing is everything for these people, isn’t it?”
Tapping away at his phone under the table as the wedding speeches were going on, he sent the money from his account (which wasn’t with the bank he worked for). It recognised the receiving bank as one based in Australia.
He said: “I should have phoned her but I was at this wedding and it felt fine. So I pressed send and the money was gone.”
He got a WhatsApp message five minutes later, claiming to be from Alice, thanking him. When the scammer asked for another £1,000, alarm bells rang. Neil tried to call his daughter but she did not pick up. “I got a text back that said, ‘Oh, Dad, I’m in the queue for the bank, I’ll call you back in a minute’.”
He realised it was 7am in Australia, his daughter was asleep and he had lost his money to a scammer.
Fraud is the most common crime in the UK. The country is losing far more to fraud than other European countries. About £3 billion was lost to scammers in 2025, according to Nasdaq Verafin, which provides fraud detection software. In France, losses totalled £1.2 billion and in Germany £2.26 billion.
Neil is sharing his story as part of our Smarter with Money campaign to show how, when scammers strike at just the right moment, anyone can be convinced. The Times is calling on tech sites to take more responsibility for the scams and misinformation being shared on their platforms and to prevent scams from reaching their victims in the first place.
After realising his mistake, Neil called his bank but it was too late. The bank investigated and initially denied him a refund, so he took his complaint to a different department. Eventually, it did refund the money and reported the incident to the police.
Neil did not believe he could fall for such a simple scam. It has left him more cautious and nervous than before.
Targeted by scammers
Kamlesh Harry, a fraud risk expert at Nasdaq Verafin, said it was “highly likely” that Neil was purposefully targeted. He said: “This may be a case where fraudsters have leveraged data from social media — for example, someone posting about moving abroad or being excited about moving abroad.”
Email threads are vulnerable to being hacked, which can give a fraudster insight into personal details they can use to scam you, Harry said.
Nasdaq Verafin’s financial crime report found that the amount of money lost to fraud in the UK was up 22 per cent since 2023, compared with 17 per cent across the EU.
Harry said the UK was targeted because of its currency. “The pound is considered to be one of the strongest currencies in the world. So a small value, turned into another currency, often turns out to be significantly larger in terms of what they are gaining,” he said.
Financial firms must reimburse victims of authorised push payment fraud — when a victim is persuaded to transfer money to the scammer’s account — up to £85,000 unless the victim is proven to have been negligent when losing their money. Interpol and other crime agencies say the money the scammers receive is used to fund organised crime networks.
*Name has been changed
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