Scams ahoy! | Diana Clement on the RaboPlus Blog

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Scams ahoy!

Submitted by Diana Clement on Thursday, 22 October 2009 | Category: Insurance

New Zealand is quite simply awash with scams. Hardly a week passes when yet another one is highlighted in the media and some poor soul loses thousands of dollars.

Scammers are getting increasingly clever at getting money out of unsuspecting victims. Earlier this month I got an email from a fellow journalist requesting that I wire money to the UK because she'd allegedly lost her wallet.

Fortunately I didn't know the woman well enough to think that she'd ask me for money. As it turned out, a hacker had hijacked her Gmail account and sent emails to everyone in the address book requesting money in her name. Pretty clever huh.

Facebook members have also been targeted with similar scams where friends claim to be stranded overseas and in desperate need of cash . Other scams include dating scams where love struck Kiwis have been conned out of money to help out a newfound love they met online to pay medical bills or for an airfare to New Zealand or similar.

There have also been house letting scams here in New Zealand, where a prospective tenant sees a rental property advertised online and is asked to pay the bond and first week's rent up front before viewing. Invariably the property isn't available to let – or in extreme cases a criminal has got hold of the keys and is showing people around before taking deposits.

There is no single answer to avoid being scammed – although it's worth familiarising yourself with the website Scamwatch.govt.nz. You need to remain on your toes at all times.

Sad as it may be, it's not a good idea to hand over money to complete strangers – no matter how dire their situation appears.

Nor should you believe any requests for money received via email. Do what I did and call the person in question. I found that the journalist was out on her morning walk right here in New Zealand .

The really big red flag for me was the mention of Western Union. Although a genuine company, anyone asking you to transfer money through it should be treated with utmost suspicion. That's because scammers can simply pick up their ill gotten gains in cash from any one of thousands of small outlets around the world.

Other red flags to be on the lookout for include:

  • "tradespeople" who knock on your door offering services, but require cash up front
  • Any unexpected contact from strangers via email or in person
  • Anyone who cold calls you . If the offer was that great there would be no need to cold call
  • Any offer that seems too good to be true.

The moral is don't assume you'll never be a victim. Be sceptical. The emails continue to con people.

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4 Comments

Comment by Jurgen Giess on 24-10-2009 06:25


Talking about scammers. We have a BNZ Global Plus Gold Visa card. ‘Gold’ because certain advantages and benefits were offered, like more air points / dollar spent and FREE travel insurance. Now we know that nothing is FREE and Visa cards cost money i.e. there is an annual fee. The Gold Card fee is double that for a regular Visa card, because it apparently offers more and better benefits.

This may well have been the case at its introduction but benefits have since been regularly and dramatically reduced:
1) Participating retailers (certain petrol stations, travel operators and insurance companies) have since been removed from the participating retailers’ list and have not been replaced meaning, we no longer get the benefit of double air points.
2) Air points earned / dollar spent was reduced from 1.1 air points to 0.66 air points.
3) The tiered interest rates were removed (BNZ states there was a “diminished perceived need for it”).
4) An additional fee for a second card holder was demanded (where husband and wife for example hold the same card)
5) An excess of $200 on travel insurance was introduced, previously no excess.
6) Travel insurance benefits were reduced to point of total inadequacy.
7) A condition was added that 50% of any travel “must be paid with the BNZ Visa card” in order to qualify for air points. This means that some ‘special’ travel offers, which are based on cash payment, attract an extra 4% ($200.00) when payment is made with a Visa card.

We recently discovered that the BNZ Global Plus Gold Visa travel insurance only covers travelers for 35 days. We needed cover for 39 days. We contacted the bank to see if we could buy the extra 4 days cover but were told, that “bank policy does not permit this”! We were also told, that if we stayed one day more than the 35 days permitted, our travel insurance cover would be null and void for the entire 35 days.

We ended up buying travel insurance from an Australian insurer over the Internet for $480.00 because most New Zealand insurers quoted between $900 and $1250 for essentially the same cover.

We see these $480 as an additional cost of having the “benefit” of a BNZ Global Plus Gold Visa card. We have effectively paid $480 for a 4 day travel insurance cover because of the intransigence of the card issuer.

So no need to point fingers at Nigerian scammers.



Comment by Diana Clement on 26-10-2009 09:43


Jurgen, that’s an incredibly interesting take on rewards points and the travel insurance associated with gold cards. I know from interviewing the Insurance & Savings Ombudsman many times that gold card travel insurance gets the most complaints. Did you see my blog about rewards points? I personally use the ASB gold card because I get far more back on points than I spend on the annual fee. Also, I get supermarket and petrol vouchers, which are effectively cash.

Take a look at this blog I wrote in 2008:
http://www.raboplus.co.nz/blog/post/rewards-points-200608.aspx

Comment by Jurgen Giess on 27-10-2009 12:41


Thanks Diana for your comments to my blog and your tip about the ASB Gold Card. Have also just read your blog on reward-points. Some of it I did not know. Quite an eye opener. Readers will appreciate the effort you have made.

Not many people know that most 'Loyalty Cards' are only information gathering tools with little benefit to the holder. There are a couple of exception though: 'The Warehouse' and 'Mitre 10 Mega'.

My take on the Visa credit card 'reward points' however is much more cynical. To get the card, you effectively enter a written contract between yourself and the card issuer. Then, when you fail to make a payment on time or do something contravening the wording and intentions of that contract, you are penalised with all sorts of fees and excessive surcharges. Yet, when the bank breaches the same contract (reduction of benefits), they don't compensate you for the loss of those benefits and they make no attempt to reinstate those benefits. They just show you the fingers and grin, like 'come and get us if you can'.

Sadly, we often forget that people run banks and it's people who deceive us, not banks.

Comment by Diana Clement on 28-10-2009 01:40


Thanks again for another interesting and thought-provoking posting Jurgen.

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