Venmo users have been warned over a new breed of 'pickpocket' after a '12-year-old boy' stole $4,000.
While they may not like to admit it, most people recoil when a stranger asks to use their phone. It's nothing explicitly personal - we're all just a bit hard-wired to be suspicious of what someone's intentions could be (that, and phones are way more expensive now than ever).
Alas, it's hard to convince someone otherwise when a story like this emerges: one woman's generosity to a child ended with her losing thousands of dollars.
Speaking to WESH2, Shannon Fraser explained how a boy who 'looked about 12 years old' ran up to her in Orlando, Florida, earlier this month. The boy told a convincing tale, claiming his own phone was dead and he needed to contact his family and friends so they could help him.
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What would you do in this situation? As the all-knowing reader, you're probably thinking you'd never give into the conniving puppy eyes of a child, because you know better, obviously. Let's be real, here: you'd definitely give them your phone, lest you send an abandoned, hapless youth away without an adult to help them.
'Your first instinct is to help a kid. Without thinking, and hindsight is 20/20, I just handed him my phone,' she recounted.
As soon as he got his fast-tapping paws on the phone, he quickly opened her maps app. While she was keeping an eye on him, she didn't notice him opening her Venmo app and secretly initiating transactions worth nearly $4,000 before high-tailing it.
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Two days later, she received notifications from the app, and she realised what happened. 'I stopped dead in my tracks... I feel like this is the new pickpocket. They're praying on your kindness as opposed to just stealing from you,' Fraser said.
After contacting Venmo for assistance, she was informed the bank account the funds had been transferred to were set up less than an hour before she encountered the young boy.
In a statement, a Venmo spokesperson said, 'The security and privacy of all Venmo users and their information has always been a top company priority. Venmo has a number of options in place providing customers the ability to enable enhanced layers of security to help further protect their accounts directly within the app.
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'We encourage customers who suspect they are the target of a scam or have had an unauthorised transaction to contact Customer Service directly.'
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Topics: US News
Cameron Frew