Scammers clean out Shashi Naidoo's bank account
The model and businesswoman lost hundreds of thousands of Rands after scammers gained access to her banking apps after stealing her phone.
Shashi Naidoo has warned her fans to take extra measures when their phones are stolen. Otherwise, they could end up with a zero bank balance.
Shashi revealed that she was recently the victim of phone theft, which led to an even bigger nightmare.
"I was MCing an event and as I got out of my Uber and got into the parking lot, someone ran up to me [and] grabbed my phone. That is what I thought was the end of it," she said in a video shared on Instagram.
She dismissed the phone theft as "bad luck" and went on to MC the event. However, the model did get a friend to log into her laptop and list her phone as lost within twenty minutes.
Shashi also tried to do a SIM swap the next day. She was told that the SIM would be activated in three to 24 hours. Everything seemed fine until her manager called to say she was having trouble paying staff salaries.
Shashi, who was about to get on a flight to Dubai, thought it had something to do with her SIM swap affecting her banking apps.
"I thought I would just pop into ABSA at the airport. I check in, go into ABSA, get a hold of all my apps, and they have cleaned out my savings account. They cleared out R500,000 on the credit card, and I had an access bond, so they withdrew all of the money from my bond, put that into my savings and then spent that," she said.
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Things only got worse from there. Shashi then quickly rushed to FNB only to find that they did the same on that banking app.
"I recently sold my house so all that money was sitting in my savings." A tearful Shashi says she is unsure how the scammers bypassed some of her phone's security features
"I haven't figured out how they got into my apps without facial recognition and passwords. I don't know."
Shashi advised her followers to always make sure they always contact their banks first.
"If your phone does get stolen... just phone your banks immediately." She says she wouldn't wish this experience on her worst enemy.
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Main image credit: Instagram/Shashi Naidoo