Hello, Jenny, standage.

Hello, Mummy, it's Tom here. How are you?

I'm okay, thanks, yes.

This is my mum. She emailed me the other day to say she'd been hacked.

Well, I was run up by somebody and he said he was a BT internet man and he said he was going to shut our internet down

in order to help me to stop other people interfering.

Last week she'd been run up by someone who said they were from her broadband provider.

He got me onto the computer and got me to open the stuff.

They managed to persuade her to turn off her firewall and install software on her computer that they could then use to take over her computer.

They wanted to get into the router and they wanted to put security in the router for their Matt West account and for my things, his bank account.

They got her to log into her online bank accounts and they spun her some yarn about doing security checks which was really all just a trick to get her to give them the codes that they needed to start moving money out of her account.

At that stage, they were sort of like fiddling around. They'd got control of my mouse.

Right.

But they'd got in and they'd got control and I couldn't stop it. I should have stopped it much earlier than that.

It was so plausible. I can't believe I was so hoodwinked. I really can't. They told me they were trying to fix it so it was secure.

Then of course the bank rang her up and said someone was trying to move 9,000 pounds to India and did she really mean to do this.

She's ended up having to close one account and disable online banking on the other.

I had to go around that evening and clean all the crap off her computer before she could use it again.

What would have happened if I had finished the call when he was inside the box and everything?

He wasn't really inside the box so I think they made you go and look at the router in the other room so that you wouldn't notice what was going on on the screen of your computer

which was they were setting themselves up as a payee.

Anyway, don't beat yourself up about it. It happens to lots of people and the main thing is that the bank stepped in and nothing bad has happened and it won't happen again.

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