A DEVASTATED bride-to-be has shared how she was forced to cancel her wedding after she lost £12,000 in a WhatsApp scam.
The unidentified woman admitted that she told her family she canceled her wedding plans due to Covid after falling victim to a job scam.
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The 34-year-old from Singapore explained that it took her nearly two years to save up the money for her wedding that she ended up losing in a matter of hours.
She told the Straits Times: “I lost almost everything I’d been saving up for my wedding. I was naive and too eager to make money that it didn’t even cross my mind that it could be a scam.
“The toughest part has been keeping this a secret from my family. I’m too ashamed to tell them and I don’t want them to worry.
“I can only tell them I’m putting off the wedding due to Covid-19.”
The said she stumbled upon a Facebook ad for a remote part-time job in marketing with flexible hours so she thought she could make a little bit of extra cash before the wedding.
The fraudsters, posing up as the e-commerce platform Qoo10 informed her she got the job as a marketing associate.
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The woman was advised to pay in advance for products on the platform to boost the sales figures and was told she was going to be reimbursed with a small commission.
The 34-year-old said she was then added to a WhatsApp group and noticed some of the messages were from foreign phone numbers.
She added: “I thought it was strange that (the scammers) told me to make payment to a bank account they provided, instead of paying on the platform.
“But I brushed it off thinking I was paying directly to the merchant’s bank account.”
At first, she started by transferring £450 ($620) into the account- making a profit of £73 ($100).
As she saw over £500 ($720) transferred into her account she agreed to another task sending £1000 but the money was not returned.
When she asked her “managers” she was told she took longer than ten minutes to complete the task so she would not receive her money back.
She was also directed to do “overtime tasks” in order to receive her funds back which she did so, hoping she would make up for the lost money.
“Getting my money back was all I could think about. I just followed instructions because I thought that was my only hope,” she said.
She kept sending over money but the scammers told her she was too slow or the job had not been completed in the right way.
Just in a few hours, she had spent £12,000 ($17,000) “buying” desktops, watches, gym equipment, video games and jewellery from six merchants.
Despite her sending countless messages to the WhatsApp group, she was ignored so she decided to file a police report and tell her fiance.
The company states on its website that it is aware of job scams and urged customers to report the ads to the police.
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