It was in Australia, amount was thousands of dollars, she noticed when she was asked to enter yet another code and all of a sudden it made her snap out of her "autopilot" and take notice and look at the URL and other details. So as soon as she realised that something was fishy, she logged into the correct site, then saw the money was gone.
> In the US the bar to pull money out of an account is pretty low. Most banks would allow reasonably-sized transfers out with just routing and account numbers. I was stunned by this, but this is the reason utilities and stores can pull your money without you even talking to your bank. Just give them the info. And that information is not secret, it is printed on your every check. The flip size is that for those "convenience" and service payments the money is easy to get back: banks, at least traditional, will bend over backwards to prevent being seen as enabling fraud.
This was a "pay anyone" transfer. So money was being transferred to a bank by BSB/Account number in the background. The bank required a code when a new Payee is added, but the codes were not differentiated, so she was asked for a code to login, then told the code was wrong and asked for another code. In the background the real banking site to which her actions were being replaced had successfully logged in and had initiated a transfer to a new Payee. The real banking site asked the attackers for a code to add the new Payee, the fake banking site asked her for a new code to login.
The thing that really enabled the attack is that the same code generator was used for both codes, without any indication that a different action was being performed.