Andy Cohen’s 2023 apparently involved getting scammed.
The Radio Andy host shared how he became a victim of fraud on an episode of his Daddy Diaries podcast. “Someone called saying they were fraud alert from my bank,” he said on the episode about scammers pretending to be his bank.
When Cohen, 55, was contacted about potential fraud on his bank account, he remembered he’d recently lost a debit card. It made him think the two were related — so he offered up his information in the belief he was talking to a real employee from the financial institution.
“Then it asked for my Apple ID and password,” he said. “And I was like… ‘OK, this never happens.’ ”
That’s when Cohen “bailed out” — but it was too late. “I had already logged into my bank app, and I think somehow, my logging in through whatever this site was gave them access to my bank app,” he shared.
The Watch What Happens Live host also clarified that the scam callers hacked the caller ID system, so their call appeared as the name of his bank on Cohen’s phone. At the time, he believed they were legitimately a fraud alert team calling about the earlier hacking — but Cohen didn’t realize that it was the same callers.
“They were naming credits that I had made — the charges — because they clearly had access to my account,” he recalled, before explaining that “what I should have said is, ‘Can I call you back?’ Or what I should have maybe said is, ‘I’m gonna go to my bank and handle this.’ ”
Although Cohen realized his mistake, it was too late to stop the hackers from gaining access to his funds. As he shared on the podcast, the late-night host stayed “on the line with this woman for an hour and 10 minutes,” and later saw “these people wired out of two accounts that I have a lot of money.”
The other piece of the scam: the fraudsters talked Cohen into unknowingly setting up call forwarding — meaning when his bank called about the large sum of the transfers, he was unaware.
However, there is hope for Cohen, who is “in the process of trying to get my money back.”
[via]
