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Michelle Singletary, the personal finance reporter for The Washington Post, has been my girl crush for years. In December she made me love her more than ever by publishing a series explaining how sophisticated scammers are destroying the financial lives of vulnerable Americans.
The victim whose experience provided Singletary with a wealth of insight — into both the mechanics of a “government impersonation scam” and the psychology of its success — is a Maryland retiree named Judith Boivin. Boivin answered a phone call in September 2023 that appeared to be from her local police department and was quickly persuaded that her Social Security number had been used by a Mexican drug cartel. She was asked to help the FBI clear her name and stop the bad guys.
By the end of the year, she would empty her $595,000 Morgan Stanley account, move the money into smaller accounts at multiple banks and then methodically hand it over, in cash, to the real bad guys. They had walked her step by step to her financial doom.
Singletary’s account of the scam is heart wrenching. Boivin is now 80, but age didn’t make her vulnerable. As Singletary pointed out, the Federal Trade Commission says people in their 20s are scammed at higher rates than older Americans. What made Boivin vulnerable is that she trusted authority figures, and she believed the people she was communicating with were who they said they were. The supposed FBI agent who had been assigned to her case — using a real agent’s name and a phony case number — talked to her twice a day for months, cementing what, to Boivin, felt like a relationship between colleagues working toward the same noble goal.
She bought into the law enforcement scenario so thoroughly that repeated warnings from Morgan Stanley and the banks in which she temporarily parked the money could not penetrate. Banker after banker tried, but they couldn’t refuse a customer access to her own money.
Boivin is obviously a victim, and the people who conned her out of her life savings are obviously to blame, so it was frustrating to read that she persisted in assigning some of the blame to the very bankers who kept warning her.
“I never felt that [the banks’] biggest concern was for my potential losses, although they repeated the word scam but absolutely no context of what that could look like,” Boivin told Singletary. “Rather, they described their institutional losses from other scams and how the individuals came back to blame them. Had they just been more personal and descriptive about what a scam could look like, maybe I would have wised up sooner.
“Instead, I felt like I was being judged as a crazy old lady.”
One lesson for bankers, who undoubtedly do want to protect their customers from devastating fraud: A scam warning needs to feel more personal and less professional. It needs to recognize that victims may feel a closer relationship with a scammer than with the banker who is desperately trying to save them from themselves.
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