Summerside ice cream parlour loses over $5,000 in 'sophisticated' scam
Daniel Meister suspects scammers used artificial intelligence to mimic his supplier
The owner of Holman's Ice Cream Parlour in Summerside is warning other Prince Edward Island businesses to beware after he was the victim of an elaborate scam.
It all started in December, when Daniel Meister reached out to his regular cup supplier for an order of ice-cream sundae dishes.
"They sent me a quote. At the time I was doing some renovations on the parlour… so I kinda just said, 'Let's leave it until we reopen again for our season in February and we'll revisit it.'"
When February came around, Meister got a follow-up email. He was on vacation at the time, but everything looked normal, so he "quickly replied to that email and said, 'Yep, we're good. I'm ready to process this. I'll do this as soon as I get back.'"
The scammer sent Meister a few more emails while he was on vacation, one of them being an invoice.
"Everything about the invoice looked identical to the one I'd received, except for the banking information at the bottom had been edited."
Meister said there were a few red flags that he should have noticed, such as the edited banking information, and the fact that the invoice came from a different email address than the one he had been using for that supplier. But he didn't.
"When you're running a business, there's so many things on your brain. I kind of just ran to the bank," he said.
At the bank, Meister wired just over $5,000 to the altered email address without a second thought. A few days later, he got another email saying the money had not arrived.
"That's weird, the money left my account," he remembers thinking.
After emails back and forth between the scammer and the bank, Meister said the scammer kept pressuring him to send more money, even offering discounts. That's when he started to get "an icky feeling," he said.
I wouldn't be surprised if there were multiple people managing this scam email account.— Daniel Meister
"There started to be some inconsistencies in their messages. I wouldn't be surprised if there were multiple people managing this scam email account," he said. "Some details... didn't make sense."
When Meister realized he was talking with an email scam, he replied to that address and copied his supplier on the using, using its actual email address from his files.
"My original contact for this company got back to me almost immediately and was like 'Daniel, this isn't me contacting you.'"
No way to recover money
Meister contacted his bank and the police to file a report, but it was too late.
"Unfortunately, once the money has been sent, there's very little that they can do to recover it," he said. "These scammers are very good at taking the money and moving it around and they know how to hide it.
"My theory is that they were able to access the email of my contact in the company that we use. What I believe happened is they set up some sort of forwarding in the email address so when I sent an email to my contact, the email would then be forwarded to them."
He thinks this because the scammer was aware of details included in the chats between Meister and his actual contact at the supplier, and would refer to them in messages to Meister.
He also suspects the culprit was potentially using artificial intelligence, or AI, to mimic his contact.
"A lot of the language was matched that they used. I'm curious if they used AI to try and match the tone and messaging," he said. "The scammers were very professional. They were very understanding. They acted like they were my friend trying to work with me to get this problem solved."
Meister said there is a level of embarrassment when it comes to falling victim to a scam, but he wanted to share his story to help prevent others from being defrauded like this. So he put a long post about the incident on the ice cream parlour's Facebook page, titled "I Got Scammed – Please Learn From My Mistake."
The post included these tips, after Meister urged other businesses to "please be smarter than I was":
- Always verify any changes to payment info or communication methods.
- Pick up the phone or use another method to confirm if something feels even a little off.
- Don't rush payments, even if you're swamped.
"I just wanted to break the stigma a little bit," he told CBC News in an interview.
"I'm a young, tech-savvy person who's running a business and here I am falling for these scams as well. We need it to be out in the world that this is happening and that it's OK to talk about it and warn each other how these scams are happening."
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