Local woman warns of iTunes email scam

A WESTBURY woman has warned of an email scam that almost left her £200 out of pocket. 

She is raising awareness of an email scam after a scammer, pretending to be her friend, asked for two iTunes gift cards, which the woman presumed was a gift for her friends’ young relatives. 

It wasn’t until a helpful staff member at Curry’s Trowbridge asked her if she was aware of a current scam going on, that she realised something was amiss. She checked with the friend in question who confirmed that it was a scam. 

The resident said, “I’m by no means a technophobe! If this can happen to me, the chances are it’s happening to more people. 

“I received an email purporting to come from a friend, saying she was in a meeting currently but needed me to buy a couple of iTunes gift cards at £100 each, scratch off the covering to expose the code, photograph it and e-mail it to her and she’d pay me back today.  I know she has young relatives in Australia and assumed it was a birthday thing that needed doing speedily.  She helped me when I had Covid, so it seemed a perfectly natural request. 

“I went to Currys in Trowbridge and bought the cards.  The person who served me said, ‘I need to check that you know there is a scam going around where they ask you to buy two cards like this, and we are warning all our customers, just in case.”  “Oh no problem here” I said, “I know that this is fine.”  I paid and left the store. 

“However, on the way home, I started wondering if this was in fact a scam and could I have read the whole situation wrong from the beginning.  I called my chum and of course she hadn’t sent any such e-mail and then I checked the e-mail address it had been sent from – it was somewhere quite random and I realised I had in fact been scammed.   

“I didn’t do what they asked and took the untouched cards back to Currys and they gave me a full refund.  I thanked the manager and his team for flagging this up as without it, I would definitely have just done as I was asked to do. 

“I’m not a technophobe and am very, very careful about never opening anything I’m not expecting.  I get large picture files as part of the work I do (I am nominally retired!) and created my own protocol for the receipt of pics, so I’m never getting something I’m not expecting.” 

Police Sergeant Kevin Harmsworth said, “Unfortunately, there are always many scams ongoing.  People need to report such incidents to Action Fraud, who also give out relevant crime prevention advice.  Action Fraud collate reports nationally, then when suspects are identified (within England and Wales) they task the most appropriate Police Service to arrest and prosecute them.”