Woman who lost $35K in distraction theft feels ‘victimized’ twice after bank denies reimbursement

A Calgary woman who recently fell victim to a distraction theft scam is fighting to get the thousands of dollars she lost reimbursed by the Bank of Montreal.

A Calgary woman who recently fell victim to a so-called “distraction theft” says she feels victimized twice since it happened back in early March: first, during the crime and afterwards, by one of her banks.

Indu Paul said it all started back on March 8, when she was sitting in a grocery store parking lot.

‘There was a person that knocked on my window,” she recounted. “He said, ‘You need to look, there is an issue with your tire.’”

Paul said, on impulse, she leaped out of the car to look at the tire but didn’t see anything wrong with it.

Paul said the man then advised her to look again, this time at the tire on the other side of her vehicle.

Again, she said, no issues. The problems started, she said, when she got home.

“I come home and my cellphone dings,” she said. “There’s an email from American Express that there was a charge and they denied it.”

She decided to check her wallet to see which credit card it was, because she had two.