Urgent alert to ALL mobile banking customers over new ‘trick’ that drains your account in seconds – don’t get caught out

SCAMMERS are using new tricks to con mobile bankers out of tens of thousands of pounds. 

The crooks clone the bank’s phone number, telling customers to double check it on Google, and use the same hold music.

And they pretend to be from the fraud team when they call. 

One jeweller lost £50,000 when he was tricked into giving his details to a scammer after they pretended to be from Barclays. 

The businessman, who is in his 70s, said the long-established family-run jewellers is still recovering from the financial shock.

The scam took place in April 2024, when the jeweller received a phone call from someone claiming to be ‘Andrew’ from Barclays, who warned him of unusual activity on his account.

He was told that a payment of £18,123 had been paid to Energy One Limited. The number that they called him on was cloned.

“I checked it was a genuine Barclays number, and they asked me to confirm my overdraft limit for security reasons,” said the jeweller.

“They even used the same horrible hold music that Barclays play, which I’ve heard so many times before in legitimate circumstances. There seemed no reason to think it was not them.”

Believing he was now speaking to ‘Charlie Adams’ from the Barclays fraud team, the victim was instructed to log in to his business bank accounts on his desktop computer.

From there he unknowingly downloaded AnyDesk, a programme that gives third parties access to your computer.

“They said the screen would go blank, and then that was the end of it,” he said. “Nothing more happened after that, and I assumed they must have sorted it out.

“But during the night, I was lying awake thinking ‘this is a strange thing that’s been going on’. I got up in the middle of the night, went downstairs, logged into the accounts, and saw that they had left a few pence in them.

“I was pretty devastated, and wondered what had gone wrong.”