Disclaimer: In Real Life is a platform for everyday people to share their experiences and voices. All articles are personal stories and do not necessarily echo In Real Life’s sentiments.
It all started with an email early in the morning.
Actually, two emails. One was sent to my personal email and the other to my work email. But the content was the same.
The subject was “Quick Task” and it was addressed to me from the CEO of the company I work at.
My mind went into overdrive, naturally. I’m 25 years old and although I’ve had a few interactions with our big boss, the fact that he wanted me to run an errand for him made me jump to do his bidding.
I enquired as to how I could help him, and the replying email told me that he wanted me to help him purchase gift cards from different stores.
He said he needed RM3,000 worth of them
It was really early in the morning at the time, like around 8 AM.
At first, I requested an advance, but he said that he was in a conference and busy, and told me to use the money I had first, assuring me that he would reimburse me once he wasn’t held up. I told him that I didn’t have iTunes and he told me to go to a physical store.
I didn’t question why he didn’t know that physical stores weren’t open yet, but I did tell him that I could only get the physical cards from a retail store once they open at 10 AM.
He kept rushing me, and I didn’t question that either. I figured it was really urgent and I kept thinking of ways to get this done quickly. I even thought about helping him by ordering them on Shopee, but he wanted them ASAP.
In the end I went all the way to the mall attached to KL Sentral. I ventured into Machines, an authorised Apple product reseller, and asked if they had any iTunes gift cards.
That’s when I discovered that iTunes gift cards aren’t even available in Malaysia. Instead of wondering why he didn’t already know this, I just communicated what I found out to him.
I ended up going to 7 Eleven and checked out the cards they had on sale there.
I sent him a photo of the available gift cards and asked him how many he needed just to confirm how much he wanted me to spend. I mean, RM 3,000 was a lot to ask from me. I didn’t have that amount of money saved up.
I told him that I have only RM1,000.
He didn’t seem too concerned that I couldn’t get his desired amount, only focused on the act of me procuring them for him. I didn’t pick up the hints of desperation at the time – I just chalked it up to the urgency of the task.
I managed to purchase RM1,000 worth of Google Play cards for him through a total of 5 RM200 cards, diligently scratching off the foil and sending him the pictures.
He replied by asking me if I was still at the store. He wanted more cards.
I gave in to his demand and bought an additional RM100 Google Play gift card. Again, I scratched off the foil and sent him a picture of it.
I asked him if he needed me to do anything else for him, but he only replied with his thanks and the promise of reimbursement.
With that out of the way, I returned to my work with only RM50 in my account.
I had a meeting scheduled with my team that day. I mentioned what had happened to them, and they expressed their suspicions.
Firstly, our CEO doesn’t have a habit of asking his employees to run errands for him. Not even the interns.
Secondly, whenever he needed large purchases done he would give us access to the company card. Why didn’t he just give me that access instead of forcing me to empty out my bank account?
I started feeling suspicious as well. I asked myself, why didn’t he just message me over Slack? He has done so before to communicate with me. Why didn’t he give me the company card like he usually would?
I ended up talking to another colleague who also found the whole thing weird. She communicated with the CEO and he was shocked to hear of this.
Someone else had pretended to be him.
I sent the email chain to the CEO, the IT department and the company lawyers. Then I made a police report.
I’m pretty fortunate that the CEO offered to reimburse me the money that I ended up spending, as it was all that I had.
Regardless, there were so many red flags that I had somehow looked past in my enthusiasm to help my boss:
- The timestamps of the emails indicated that the sender was in a different region
- All of the communication was done over email
- The domain name of the scammer’s email address was different from the CEO’s email
- His behaviour was very much out of character
- The number of typos in the emails I received
It later turned out that my other colleagues had received similar emails. Fortunately for them, the emails had gone to their junk folders.
I wished that I had done anything differently. I could have messaged him over Slack to confirm the task. I could have double checked with someone else at work. There were a lot of moments where I could have simply stopped and thought things over.
Sadly, my age and experience worked against me here. I was so eager to do this task that my big boss asked me to do for him, I didn’t realise that scammers could work this way. The scammer had even gone to the effort of registering an email with my boss’ real name and addressed me by my name too.
Ultimately my biggest concern was if there was some sort of data breach. I was worried about the information we had as a company, about our clients.
I also received a really hard lesson in how scammers operate.
I only hope that telling my story can help other people. Being scammed out of everything I had was truly a traumatising experience, something I wouldn’t wish on anyone.
For more stories like this, read: I Found Out That Scammers Are Stealing Women’s Photos From Social Media And Posing As Sugar Mummies and I Got Catfished On A Dating App In Malaysia And It Broke My Heart.
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