A DEVASTATED York man has told how he lost almost £3,000 to audacious phone scamsters.

Keith Dearing, 60, of Stuart Road, Acomb,says he didn’t believe he would ever be duped by conmen but was fooled by the tricksters whose cunning and persistence effectively “brainwashed” him.

“I can’t believe how genuine they seemed,” said Mr Dearing, a cleaning supervisor for the courts service in York. He said the hoax had left a massive hole in his meagre finances and caused sleepless nights.

The Talk Talk customer said the scam started when he received a call from someone pretending to be from the telecoms firm, whose database was hacked in 2015, resulting in thousands of customer credit-card details and account numbers falling into the hands of cyber attackers.

York Press:

A man with a foreign accent said he was a customer-service assistant ringing about a fault on his internet router, which would be fixed by an engineer the following day, and then passed him on to a ‘Talk Talk supervisor.’

She said £200 had been transferred into his online bank account to compensate him for the inconvenience of the router ‘problem’ and instructed him to log on to his account, where he was astonished to find £4,200 nestling.

He told them they had mistakenly put £4,200 in and the woman asked him to return the £4,000 ‘overpayment by going to the Post Office in Acomb and using an international payment-transfer method.

He was told to stay on his mobile and keep his landline open, and he later realised this was so they could keep him online and take control of his laptop until he had transferred the money.

He gave the woman the transaction reference number and within half an hour the money had vanished from his account. Realising he had been duped, he called his bank and cancelled all his cards.

He said: “They were so believable. They knew everything - all my account details, my date of birth. I was on the phone to them for nearly three hours - you just get brainwashed.”

Talk Talk said it was ‘very sorry’ to hear Mr Dearing has been the victim of a scam and truly sympathised with his situation. However, his account details had not been compromised during the much-publicised cyber attack and it was not in a position to reimburse Mr Dearing, as the criminals had gained the information directly from him. It had emailed customers to warn them about scam calls.