'It asked for my Apple ID and password': Andy Cohen says he got scammed after 'someone called saying they were fraud alert from my bank'

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA: Andy Cohen recently revealed he was duped out of a lot of money last year. The radio and television talk show host opened up on 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. 

Andy Cohen lost his debit card before the incident 

When the executive producer of 'The Real Housewives' franchise was contacted about potential fraud in his bank account, he recalled that he recently lost a debit card. Cohen disclosed his information after he thought that the two were related.

The 55-year-old was unfortunately under the false impression that he was talking to a real employee from the financial institution. “Then it asked for my Apple ID and password,” he said as per Independent.co.uk. “And I was like… 'OK, this never happens,'” he added.

It was that moment Cohen "bailed out" but it was already too late by then. “I had already logged into my bank app, and I think somehow, by logging in through whatever this site was gave them access to my bank app,” he shared.

The scammers hacked the caller ID system

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.”

Besides, the fraudsters talked Cohen into unknowingly setting up call forwarding which means 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.”