LET ME BE right up front with you. This has been a thoroughly depressing story to research.
I’ve talked to one after another scam victim in our digital age — people scammed on the internet or via emails, texts or phone calls from untraceable numbers.
Some lost maybe $40 or $50 — a cheap enough lesson. One woman lost $1,000 — not so cheap. One man had $100,000 evaporate in a romance scam; he has a hard time talking about it. Another man, suspecting a scam, took $15,000 cash out of his bank but decided to stop by a police station first. That saved him.
You think you might not fall for a scam? Think again.
PAUL IKEDA, of Lynnwood, a product director for a software company, got a scary phone call the morning of May 23. It was from a woman identifying herself as a State Patrol officer, giving her badge number and saying the call was being recorded.
“I was a suspect in a set of drug trafficking and money laundering crimes,” Ikeda would recall in a diary entry.
He did due diligence and Googled the phone number that showed up on his caller ID. “It seemed legit.”
But as the FCC points out, scammers can “spoof a number from a company or a government agency that you might already know and trust.” The apps to do that are easily available. They’ll even change a voice, and add background noises.
A July 2019 report by the FTC is headlined, “Government impostor scams top the list of reported frauds,” with the vast majority starting with a phone call. From 2014 to 2019, the FTC got 1.3 million such reports. The scammers’ specialty is creating “a sense of urgent fear,” says the agency.
For Ikeda, the fake news from the scammers escalated, as the call lasted more than four hours. To make it sound real, sometimes the scammer put Ikeda on hold “while he ‘verified’ some of the details of my story.” Ikeda was told a rental car and rental property in Colorado had been paid for by someone using his ID. Meth, fentanyl, cash, firearms and traces of blood were found at the scene.
“I had my suspicions. But they sounded very official, and didn’t ask for anything upfront,” says Ikeda.
Ikeda then was transferred to someone identified as an officer with Homeland Security, and then to someone allegedly with the Department of the Treasury. Again, Ikeda did due diligence and Googled their names. “Seemed legit.”
If profiles of law enforcement personnel are on the internet, it’s easy to appropriate them.
Ikeda was told not to discuss what was going on with anyone, including his wife, as it might “compromise the investigation.”
He also was told all his liquid assets would be frozen, and a new Social Security number and driver’s license issued. He was told to go to his bank and withdraw what he’d need for the next weeks.
Ikeda drove to his bank while the scammer was still on the phone, and took out $15,000 in cash. The scammer told him to drive to a specific Lynnwood convenience store that had an ATM into which he could deposit the money to start this new account.
On the way to the store, Ikeda decided there were too many red flags. He pulled into the Lynwood Police Department. He hung up on the scammer, who then called him 14 more times, and then began texting.
Ikeda called his wife. “She was pretty scared. She had noticed the funds had been withdrawn: ‘What’s going on?’ ”
At the station, Ikeda began telling his story to Officer Brittany Orlosky, who stopped him and “actually finished the details,” he says.
The next time the scammer called, Orlosky answered Ikeda’s phone and identified herself, and, as she had predicted, the scammer hung up.
Orlosky says that in the past few years, she’s dealt with 10 to 15 scams in which victims were induced to send money.
Ikeda, she says, “was supersmart. He came into the police department before sending the money.”
The other victims? Not so lucky. They filed reports after their money was gone.
SCAMMING EXPLODED during the pandemic, when so many Americans stayed home and communication was mostly on the phone and the internet:
● 2019, before COVID: The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center logged 470,000 complaints that resulted in $3.5 billion lost.
● 2022, in the COVID aftermath: Complaints escalated to more than 800,000, with $10 billion lost.
And even those figures are probably low, says Maria Konnikova, author of the 2016 New York Times best-seller “The Confidence Game,” which explains the art of the scam.
“However bad you think the problem is, it’s worse,” she says in a phone interview from New York City. “It’s willfully underreported. Some people are too embarrassed. Some people don’t realize they were scammed: ‘I just got unlucky.’ Con artists are terrible people who ruin people. There are sucker lists passed around.”
In June, Susan Pelton, of Seattle, while baking at home, got a call on her cellphone from a man who said he was a Seattle Police officer. He sounded very official, giving his name and badge number.
“When I think about it, it’s still terrifying,” she says of the 24-minute ordeal. Pelton is a former Seattle Times newsroom employee.
The fake cop told her a family member had been in an incident, and they needed her help calming him down. A fake “family member” was put on the phone.
“I couldn’t understand the incoherent whimpering, which got louder and more desperate the more I tried to comfort,” Pelton says.
The fake cop asked who the whimpering person could be; he said they were maybe 18 or 20. The only person Pelton could think of was her husband’s grandchild. Her husband is Rich Buck, also a former Times newsroom staffer.
Her recollection of what happened then is “a jumbled mess,” says Pelton. The gist of it was that it wasn’t a cop calling, but a drug dealer, and the “grandchild” had witnessed a drug deal, which caused it to fall through, and the drug dealer had lost $50,000. The caller told Pelton not to tell anyone, or the “grandchild” would be sold.
The scammer wanted money. He wanted to meet at a Walmart parking lot. Pelton lives in West Seattle and didn’t know of a nearby Walmart. She suggested the Home Depot in her neighborhood.
In her panicked state, she mapped the Home Depot in Sodo on her phone.
The scammer asked whether she had an ATM card. Pelton said she had a credit card, but she had no idea how to use a credit card in an ATM. The scammer told her to turn around, drive home and get cash from her husband, or at least the card’s PIN.
By the time she got home, Buck had called the real grandchild and learned they were safe. The scammer hung up. Maybe Pelton’s mix-up with mapping Home Depot and with the PIN caused enough delay to save her, she says.
“Of course, now I can see the red flags. How could I not suspect? In the moment, it was scary and real,” says Pelton.
She says a relative in law enforcement advised her about her story: “Share it! Get word out! And don’t feel stupid.”
IN AUGUST, Sonja Lauber, who owns a hair salon in Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood, couldn’t resist an ad that popped up on her Instagram account.
It looked like an astounding summer sale at Dick’s Sporting Goods. The fake ad used the real Dick’s logo, along with images of six pairs of sneakers.
“HOKA tennis shoes for a ridiculous amount of $19.99 a pair. I totally fell for it,” says Lauber. The usual price is in the $140 range.
“It didn’t dawn on me it wasn’t real,” she says about the ad.
She ordered two pairs. “I never got a confirmation email. Absolutely nothing.”
Now she’s in the midst of a fraud report with Bank of America. “Slow down,” advises Lauber, when seeing too-good-to-be-true ads.
IT’S FINE WITH scammers to cheat you out of even relatively small amounts.
Doug Shadel is the former AARP Washington State director who runs a fraud prevention consulting company and has co-authored a number of studies on fraud.
He says, “I worked on a case, which was one of those tech support scams. There were 3,500 victims. They charged them as low as $108 or $249, but the kicker was that they downloaded software that creates a pop-up three months later that they scam again for, like, $500.”
And 3,500 times, say, $108, equals $378,000. Not bad.
It’s a misconception that it’s mostly older adults who fall for scams, according to the FTC. It’s just that different age groups tend to fall for different scams.
In a 2022 report, the agency says that those 60 and older are 400% more likely to fall for tech support scams. They didn’t grow up with computers. A typical example is when your screen suddenly fills with a “CRITICAL ALERT FROM WINDOWS. This computer is BLOCKED.”
Actually, your computer is not blocked. Use the task manager feature in Windows to close the browser in which the scam appeared.
Younger adults, those under 60, are 86% more likely to fall for online shopping scams, and 448% more likely to fall for job and employment agency scams.
EDGAR ROCHELSON, of Issaquah, helps scam victims. He has the right temperament: a calm demeanor; expertise, with a list of phone numbers and agencies the victim can contact; practical advice.
Retired from work as a marine claims specialist, he’s one of 190 volunteers nationwide who call scam victims who’ve contacted the AARP Fraud Watch Network Helpline (877-908-3360).
Some volunteers come into the AARP office in SeaTac, as Rochelson did on this day; some work out of an office in Denver; and some work remotely from various locations. In 2022, they handled 90,000 such calls from around the country.
On this particular call, he’s dealing with an Oregon woman whose credit card has been overdrawn by $3,000 because of a scam.
The woman truly believed that Jennifer Aniston had reached out to her on Twitter, now “X,” to help a charity for children.
The AARP has reported on cybercriminals posing as celebrities as varied as Blake Shelton and Mick Jagger. Even President Joe Biden’s voice has been impersonated in a scam call in which he tells the lucky callers they’ve won millions from Publishers Clearing House.
If you’re given the name of a charity, plug in the name at give.org, run by the Better Business Bureau. If it’s legit, deal directly with the charity.
The woman Rochelson is helping is 70, and her income consists of Social Security and an annuity.
Now, she says, “I’m screwed.”
She also gave the scammer her bank routing and account numbers. The scammer unsuccessfully attempted to withdraw money from her bank.
Rochelson goes through his list with callers: Put in a fraud alert with the major credit bureaus. Here’s how to do it, and here’s a phone number. Contact the state’s consumer protection people at this number. How far are you from your bank? Go make sure your direct deposits keep coming.
He’s always reassuring.
As for the lost money, he says, “I doubt she’ll be able to get it back. But we gave her the resources. The main thing is to get her back on her feet.”
WHAT’S LOVE GOT to do with it? Nothing for the romance scammers, whose numbers have skyrocketed in recent years, says the FTC. In 2021, it says, 56,000 reported romance scams brought in a record $547 million.
As with all scams, the FTC notes only a small fraction is reported.
In July and August 2021, a local man texted back and forth some 500 times on WhatsApp with someone portraying herself as a young woman in Hong Kong. At least, that’s what the images she sent showed.
The target says it ended up costing him $100,000 as the texts evolved into the scammer discussing an investment in cryptocurrency.
Two years later, the man, in his early 70s, still has a hard time talking about the scam. He asked for anonymity. He has told only his son and a close friend.
He has made a report to the FTC and has a case number. He provided the back-and-forth texts, and a statement from his bank showing he made two $50,000 wire transfers to a fake website for investing in cryptocurrency.
The man says he had gone through a divorce in 2020. He was, he says, “devastated by loneliness.” As he was navigating his new life, a message appeared on his WhatsApp: “Hi Susan. I’m in New York. Would you like to get together for lunch?”
Being polite, the man answered, “I think you’ve got the wrong person.”
He had bitten. Such messages, supposedly sent by mistake, are typical at the beginning of the scams.
Initially, they went like this. Hong Kong woman: “Spent a sweet morning, I give you a gentle blessing, and may it bring you health, good luck and happiness every minute and every second. Hope you have a great day!”
A possible romance?
“That’s what I wanted it to be.”
He says, “I was gullible, which does not do much for my self-esteem.”
Eventually the texts from the woman turned to talk of cryptocurrency: “You can follow me to learn, follow my instructions to complete, I will guide and teach you how to operate in the crypto market.”
When wiring the money, the man remembers the person at his bank asking, “Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”
The money he lost represents about a sixth of his savings, he says.
It’s a vile phrase, but the words scammers use to describe what they do to their romance scam victims is “Sha Zhu Pan,” which loosely translates to “pig butchering.”
SEAN GALLAGHER is principal threat researcher with Sophos X-Ops, a cybersecurity firm headquartered in Oxford, U.K. He lives in Maryland. In February, he published a paper detailing a Cambodia-based pig-butchering scam.
“I hate that term. It’s a metaphor for, you fatten up the victim before you take them apart financially,” he says.
In his paper, Gallagher details the weekslong text conversation he had with a scammer to expose the operation. It mirrors what happened to the man who lost $100,000.
“I’ve heard that story literally 100 times,” says Gallagher.
Besides Southeast Asian countries, numerous others show up as hot spots for scam call centers. Nigeria and India are often listed as top scamming centers. Says Gallagher, “If you can make $100 or $200 off one scam, that’s serious money for a young adult in Africa.”
Scammers have learned how to manipulate their victims, says Shadel.
One of the studies he co-authored was in 2016 with the Stanford Center on Longevity. “When you put people in a heightened emotional state — either happy or negative — it can lead to them making poor decisions,” he says.
Participants in the study were divided into three groups and given a small amount of money; then they played a game rigged with scam ads. One group lost money, the other won, and the third lost or won only small amounts.
The two groups that had won or lost money — “high arousal” experiences — were more willing to purchase the scam ads than the neutral group.
Humans sure can make for very easy marks.
OK, LET’S END this story on a positive note.
The good news is that there are things you can do to deal with scammers.
An astounding figure comes from GWI, an audience tracking company that studies consumers worldwide. For Americans, daily time spent on social media averages two hours, 16 minutes.
Would you take 30 minutes of those daily two hours and 16 minutes to learn how to spot scams?
You could start with the list of links that accompanies this story.
Take it from the man who lost $100,000 in the romance scam.
He says, “Spend the time. You’ll save yourself heartache, money and the embarrassment in having to explain it to family.”
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