Gary Hilburn pressed the little red woodpecker on his phone because a man on the other end of the Facetime call told him it was the only way that he could claim his prize.
That tap was a huge mistake.
By the next morning in April, his Wells Fargo savings account was drained and so was his checking account. About $20,000 from his savings account was missing, and about $1,380 was missing from his checking account.
Hilburn, a retiree that lives on Social Security, believes that the thieves used a screenshot of his own face that they had taken from the FaceTime call to unlock his Wells Fargo App and drain his accounts remotely.
“Don’t Press The Birdie”
To Hilburn the Facetime call seemed legitimate. The man who called him said he was calling from the Publishing Clearinghouse and that he had won $5,000 a week for life.
Since he had played the game for years, he honestly thought he had won a prize.
But when the man wanted him to hand over his account number to pay certain fees, he refused because he didn’t want to get scammed.
That was when the caller said there was another way to send the money. He walked Hilburn through the new way which involved making him punch in a string of numbers on his phone which he happily did.
Then came the bird. “And then he says, ‘Press the little birdie,'” Hilburn told FOX10 News. “I said, ‘I don’t have a birdie on my phone.’ He says, ‘Yeah, you do. Look in your apps.'”
When he looked, he found it. There it was, a red-headed woodpecker icon. It was a remote access app the caller had installed, the kind of program that lets someone control the phone from another location.
By punching the numbers in his phone and clicking on the app, Hilburn believes his phone was commandeered by the caller.
Since it was a FaceTime call, he believes that the scammer took a screen capture of his face and then launched his Wells Fargo Banking app and then used his face to unlock it.
It wasn’t until the next day when he found out his accounts were drained that he noticed the caller ID was interesting. It was not from publishers clearing house but from someone named “John King” from Jamaica.
In an interview with reporters, Hilburn had a warning for other people.
“So I pressed it, and God, please, if anybody does this, don’t press the birdie,” he said. ’Cause when I pressed the birdie, they took over my phone. I mean, they just went buh-de-duh-de-duh-de-duh-de.”
“They made me believe it,” he said. “The bad thing about it is, when it happened, it happened so fast.”
Strange Malware Is Creating New Risks
Hilburns story certainly sounds a little far-fetched but he is not the only elderly victim reporting that scammers are getting access to their bank accounts by infiltrating their phones.
I recently posted a story – You Dialed Your Bank But The Scammer Answered, where victims are tricked into downloading malware on their phones. After that malware is downloaded it can selectively route calls the victim makes to their banks directly to the scammers.
The malware called “FakeCall” works well, particularly against elderly victims that might not be technically savvy.
