Posted December 11, 2019 15:35:53

Photo: The Yangebup Progress Association was scammed out of more than $5,000 after its Carols by Candlelight event. (Supplied)

A Perth community organisation has been left thousands of dollars out of pocket after cyber scammers targeted their free family Christmas carols event.

Chontelle Sands, from the Yangebup Progress Association based in Perth's south, said invoices for the community's Carols by Candlelight event were intercepted via email, before bank details were altered.

"They've changed the invoices to different EFT details, we've paid it in good faith, then our suppliers are ringing us to chase payment and when we've sent [the suppliers] the remittance advice they've mentioned that the EFT details are wrong," Ms Sands said.

"We've worked out it's roughly about $5,500.

"Just different bits and pieces for the carols, so things like lighting towers, our stage, sound, security services, so a couple of different suppliers got impacted by this.

"These are our invoices for putting on this free community event."

Photo: Ms Sands said it was "devastating" the group had been targeted. (Supplied)

Ms Sands said events that had been planned for January were as good as cancelled because the association would now have to fundraise to pay its outstanding bills.

"We have approached our bank, they are doing a recall but the problem is if the money isn't in the other account to draw back on, it's not likely that we'll receive the money back," she said.

"We've left it in the hands of our bank, we'll know in about two to six weeks if they can recover it.

"We have events that we'd like to run in January and we're just not going to have the money to do that."

"It's so concerning that I've actually reached out to other local groups in the area and said look this has just happened to us, make sure for your events you're double checking your EFT details for your suppliers."

Victims of the 'man in the middle' scam

WA Consumer Protection Commissioner David Hillyard said he had not heard of such small groups being targeted before.

"We've done plenty of stories about big payments being intercepted," he said.

"And we often see those sorts of things where the scammers are chasing big dollars — $200,000, $65,000 — they're the sorts of examples that come to us.

Photo: The Association's emails were intercepted and key bank details were changed. (Supplied.)

"It may be that some of the people who are getting hit like this for $4,000, $5,000 and $6,000 are not reporting them through to us and they are trying to sort it out.

"It's a constant threat for all of us that do electronic funds transfer."

Mr Hillyard said it was a scam commonly known as the "man in the middle" scam.

"It's where people's emails, their accounts, are hacked and that's been done by way of someone's clicked on a link on a false email that has come to them, which has enabled malware to go into their system," he said.

"Or they have been in a free wi-fi area and they are not using a secure encryption method to send emails to one another, and someone has picked it up and has started to intercept their emails.

"Generally the scammers are not going to chase these people because the rewards are not high enough … for the scammers that are sitting who knows where in the world, they are looking for bigger scores than that as a rule.

"But $5,000 is $5,000."

Photo: Mr Hillyard said it was unusual that scammers went after a community group with a small amount of money. (Supplied)

Ms Sands said it was disappointing someone chose to target a vulnerable community group.

"We are a group of volunteers," she said.

"We are in this to actually put on events for the community, we give everything back to the community, so to have us targeted for putting on a free event is absolutely devastating."

Topics: consumer-protection, charities-and-community-organisations, community-organisations, fraud-and-corporate-crime, community-and-society, community-and-multicultural-festivals, perth-6000, wa, yangebup-6164