Cashless payment is pretty much the norm now but with the convenience comes the danger of scammers hacking our accounts to access our money.
That’s exactly what happened to .
Recently, 39-year-old Taiwanese star Fabien Yang aka Xiao Yu, took to his Instagram Stories to share that he had lost close to TW$300K (S$11.8K) online.
According to the former member of now-defunct Taiwanese boyband Lollipop, he had received a notification for a TW$20K (S$815) transaction one night. When he logged into his online banking account, he couldn’t find the records of the transaction.
Fabien only called the bank to check a few days later, which was when he was informed that he had been hacked.
He was told that the transaction happened on Facebook, which prompted him to terminate the card immediately.
The star later found out that his credit card details had in fact been stolen since March this year, though the transactions were only of small amounts in the beginning.
The transactions went from in the hundreds to thousands, and eventually to a total of TW$297,109 (S$12.1K) after five months.
“My kids’ school fees are gone,” cried the star, who has two sons, aged three and two years old, with wife Li Yan-yan, 32.
Fabien also added that he will only be using cash from now on to prevent such things from happening again.
He then urged others to pay attention to unknown transactions in their bank statements, and said that he does not expect to be able to recover the money he’s lost.
“I can only blame myself for the negligence. The scammers are using my money to treat their illnesses,” he snarked.
Thankfully, his wife was very understanding about what happened.
“She told me it’s okay, as long as I’m physically unharmed. We’ll just take it as the scammers need the money to see the doctor,” said Fabien, who then urged the government to triple the jail time for scammers once they get caught.