A WOMAN who lost thousands of pounds in an online scam has spoken out to stop others falling victim to the same crime.

Youngmin Miah, 55, an assistant analyst who lives in Bournemouth, was looking for a part-time job alongside her full-time work to help towards the yearly £46,000 fee for her son’s boarding school.

Having applied for several jobs without any joy, Youngmin received a WhatsApp message from someone claiming to be from Capstone Recruitment, offering her a job rating sets of movies on social platform, Letterboxd.

The job would see Youngmin earn commission for completing task – in a ‘more deposit, more profit’ type scheme, with transactions taking place through her bank, Santander, and financial app Revolut.

Over five days in June, Youngmin would be manipulated and conned out of over £8,000.

She told the Echo: “The main scammer, who went by the name Katharine, explained a job opportunity to me that involved rating sets of movies.

"She introduced me to a group chat where others shared their success stories, creating an illusion of legitimacy.

“The job seemed legitimate, and I was told I could earn USDT (Tether) as commission for completing tasks.

"The tasks were seemingly innocent movie ratings, but the scam escalated when I was lured into the trap of a ‘lucky order’ with the promise of higher profits.

"This resulted in my account balance turning negative, and I was coerced into buying USDT to clear the balance."

Katharine explained that the reason Letterboxd paid in USDT was due to its global nature, with workers all over the world receiving centralised currency.

She convinced Youngmin that the transactions were essential for real money flow data.

“Upon realising that I had fallen victim to this scam, I immediately sought help from both Santander and Revolut.

"While Santander reimbursed 50 per cent (£2,200) of the funds lost, I was disappointed by their lack of early detection and response.

“Additionally, they seemed to have overlooked some smaller transactions, and only considered larger amounts."

Had they accounted for these, the total loss through Santander would amount to £4,650.

Youngmin added: “As for Revolut, their handling of the situation was disheartening.”

In a statement, a spokesperson for Revolut said: “Revolut takes the protection of its customers extremely seriously and is fully aware of the industry-wide risk of customers being coerced by organised criminals.

“We are very sorry to hear about any instance where our customers are targeted by ruthless and highly sophisticated criminals. We have made significant investments in our systems, processes and people to ensure that our customers are safe, and we assess transactions for signs of fraud.

“Never ignore the warnings that we send to you. In Ms Miah’s case, when we detected suspicious activity, we intervened on nine occasions, holding and declining transactions, as well as warning her about the risk of fraud involved in the payments she was attempting to make.

“Revolut would like to apologise to Ms Miah for how we handled her support in this case. The communication and support she received fell below our usually high standards. As a gesture of goodwill, we are covering half of the stolen funds."