I watched helplessly as £3,000 vanished from my bank account in ‘online CV error’ – there was nothing I could do
A WOMAN was stunned when thousands of pounds disappeared from her bank account.
Bella Betterton said she felt "attacked" and "distraught" when she realised she had fallen victim to a recruitment scam and lost £3,000.
The 18-year-old had been contacted by scammers first via WhatsApp messages and then phone calls and thought she had taken part in a real job interview.
But the con artists tricked her into giving them her card details so they could steal her money.
Bella, from Devon, contacted Radio 4's Money Box after she became a victim in October.
She is hoping to start a five-year biochemistry degree next year so has taken a gap year to try to save up £10,000 to be able to afford to start studying.
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The £3,000 that was stolen was all the money she had saved working full-time over the summer.
She said: "I'd just lost a job I'd had for three years and was trying to find my feet again to be able to keep saving for uni.
"I'd put my CV out there so thought it [the scam text message]... was a legitimate thing."
The scammers carried out a convincing fake interview over the phone for a job involving her using their money to buy and review products.
The scam was so advanced that the criminals bombarded Bella with dozens of messages and phone calls until they had what they needed.
They then used all the details they'd tricked out of her, along with what she suspects was malware put on her phone, to make four large card payments to a cryptocurrency exchange using her money.
She said that when she noticed the payments she felt "shock" and "panic" and didn't know what to do as she had never experienced anything like it.
She added: "I felt quite attacked by it. It was three months' of work, the whole summer, 50 to 55-hour weeks. So I was pretty distraught and upset by it all."
New figures show the amount of money reported stolen via recruitment scam text and WhatsApp messages jumped from £20,000 to nearly £1m in the past year.
City of London Police say the number of people reporting these scams to Action Fraud increased more than eightfold.
And, alarmingly, this may be "the tip of the iceberg", according to City of London Police Temporary Commander Oliver Shaw, as this type of fraud is "hugely under reported".
Recruitment scams involve criminals luring victims in with the promise of extra work or income.
They then con them out of bank details or take control of their phones to steal money.