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Scammers have stolen $700,000 from an elderly woman, wiping her bank accounts in a cyber fraud scheme.
Scammers have drained the savings of 86-year-old Nina Mortellito after tricking her into believing that her bank accounts had been hacked, reports the New York Post.
Court documents show the scam first began in 2023, when Mortellito received a pop-up on her computer claiming that her bank accounts had been compromised.
After a malicious notification on her computer warned of compromised bank accounts, fraudsters convinced the elderly victim, who suffers from memory problems, to withdraw approximately $700,000 from her UBS, TD Bank and Merrill Lynch customer accounts and hand the funds over to them.
The report says that Mortellito – who ended up filing a lawsuit against her banks – was convinced by the bad actors that her funds needed to be converted into gold bullion to be safe.
Among the withdrawals, she was instructed to pull $275,000 from her Merrill Lynch accounts, $150,000 from her TD Bank account, and $100,000 from her UBS accounts. She also sent a check worth $30,000.
Court documents say that her banks knew that she was vulnerable to being scammed and added her niece as a co-trustee for oversight and support, but even though her withdrawals were exponentially larger any previous activity, no alarm bells rang.
As stated by Robert Georges, Mortellito’s lawyer, according to the report,
“The banks need to take reasonable steps to protect their customers, especially the elderly, who are uniquely susceptible to online scammers. Here, the banks repeatedly failed to exercise due diligence, which caused [Mortellito] to lose her life savings.”
