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Scammers Are Getting Better (Gwen Moritz Editor’s Note)

2 min read

THIS IS AN OPINION

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Charlotte Cowles used to have a column in the business section of The New York Times. Now she’s a personal advice columnist for New York magazine. She’s married, a mother and described by her own mother as “maddeningly rational.” Last month she wrote about being the victim of a scam in which she handed a shoebox containing $50,000 in cash to a stranger through a car window.

When you read her story, you have the benefit of hindsight. You know that she’s not really talking to a customer service representative from Amazon warning that she might be a victim of identity theft, and that she’s not really being transferred to a liaison at the Federal Trade Commission who is working with Amazon to prevent fraud. You know the FTC is not really transferring her call to the CIA and that the agent’s badge number is a lie. You know the CIA would not tell a citizen to empty their bank accounts and hand off the cash for safekeeping.

You see all the red flags that Cowles didn’t spot in real time, and you are too smart to fall for something like that.

And then you remember that a Kansas bank CEO with 30 years of experience — mentioned in this space for three consecutive weeks now — is charged with embezzling almost $50 million, and that the Federal Reserve’s Office of Inspector General believes he was the victim of a scam known as “pig butchering.”

Maybe you saw John Oliver’s “Last Week Tonight” episode on pig butchering and saw that other normal, reasonably intelligent people were lured into using an investment app that looked remarkably legit. Yikes.

Charlotte Cowles thought she would never be gullible enough to fall for a scam. When she withdrew 500 $100 bills, the teller at her bank “pushed the stacks of bills through the slot along with a sheet of paper warning me against scams.” But then the “CIA agent” sent her a photo of his badge.

A local attorney told me he had been consulted by a woman — an intelligent one, he assured me — who fell for a scam that also supposedly involved the Federal Trade Commission. She got cleaned out, he said, and there’s no chance at all that she will get her money back because she doesn’t know where it went. Now she’s just a statistic.

So maybe instead of being absolutely sure that we aren’t the kind of suckers who would fall for a scam, we need to embrace the kind of humility that says, “I need to be on my guard.” And we need to make sure that our loved ones, even the very intelligent ones, are similarly prepared for a very slick con.


Email Gwen Moritz, interim editor of Arkansas Business, at gmoritz@abpg.com
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