In Petropavl, a taxi driver helped a 73-year-old pensioner save over 2 million tenge from scammers, reports infohub.kz.
According to the press service of the Police Department of the North Kazakhstan Region, an unknown person called the elderly woman, introducing himself as an employee of a well-known telecommunications provider. He claimed that her contract was expiring and offered to extend it without leaving home: she needed to provide an SMS code and clearly verbally agree to the terms.
The next day, the fraudsters moved to the second stage — they began calling and claiming that because of these actions, someone had taken out a 5 million tenge loan in the woman's name. To supposedly fix the situation, she was told to withdraw all her savings from the deposit and transfer them to a "safe government account."
The scammers themselves called a taxi for the pensioner so she could go to the bank to withdraw the money. Fortunately, the driver turned out to be individual entrepreneur Viktor Timofeyev, who had just the day before been reviewing online fraud prevention materials on social media. He immediately realized that the passenger, who was being continuously instructed over the phone, had fallen into a scam.
At first, the woman did not listen to his words. The criminals persistently assured her that if anyone tried to stop her, that person should not be trusted, claiming "it's all one mafia." At the bank, Viktor warned the manager about possible fraud and called 102. Police officers who arrived promptly explained to the pensioner that she had nearly become a victim of a common scam scheme.
As a result, more than 2 million tenge were saved for the pensioner.