Commentary
The scammers are getting ever more sophisticated. Just when you think you are immune, something comes along that almost gets you. I’ve written about this subject many times. Even so, they are getting better and better at what they do. It’s a massive criminal enterprise that keeps growing in sophistication. The latest nearly scammed me.
The incident went as follows.
I received a call from San Francisco. It was not flagged as spam so I picked up. It was my bank, or so they said. The articulate voice on the other end said he was from the fraud department. That gets one’s attention. He asked to go over some charges with me. I said fine, with a sense of relief. Already I’m thinking this is the good guy on the phone saving me from a scam.
He asked if I had been traveling recently. I said yes, I’ve been here and there. Looking back, that is already a clue. What does recently mean? Could mean anytime in the last six months. In any case, I’m already roped in because I think the guy knows what’s what.
He asked about a charge of $630 in a Walmart in Fort Worth, Texas. I said that is not mine. Then he asked about a $6,340 charge at GameStop. That outraged me and I said no.
Then he asked if I had my cards on me. I checked and I did. He went further and asked if I’ve been on any public Wi-Fi networks. I said, yes, and he said that’s how they get you.
He went on to say the bank would dispute the charges. I had already gone along with the con but here should have been my clue. Up to now, it was already a confidence game. But disputing charges means that it is already charged. I went to my online banking and saw no such charges. That should have been proof enough that the guy was making things up.
Still I hung on, because no one wants to lose $7K out of one’s bank account. He said that to fix the problem, he would need to shut down my online banking for a few moments while he reset the system to dispute these charges. That’s when I grew skeptical. I searched AI for the number and it came up with nothing. I told the guy this and he had a quick answer: the fraud department never publishes its numbers.
That’s mildly believable but I’m already leaning toward the doubtful side. As a result, I hung up. He called back immediately and said we had been disconnected. I listened a bit more in case I was wrong. He said to hold on because he needs to send me a link to fix this problem. At that point I was certain.
“We are done here,” I said, and hung up again. He did not call back.
Here is what was waiting on the other end. He would have texted a link. The link would have opened a page identical to my bank’s, down to the logo and the loading spinner. My username and password would have gone to him, not to the bank.
Then he’d have “sent me a verification code to confirm my identity”—a real code, from the real bank, which is what makes it feel airtight. Typing it in would have authorized the reset. By the time the app refreshed, the account would belong to someone in a call center eight thousand miles away, and the $6,340 GameStop charge that outraged me would have been the least of it.
My entire life could have been pillaged. No one would be in a position to help me. I would have been toast.
Looking back, there were plenty of signs. For one thing, nothing he said was confirmed by any other contact, not via text, not in my banking portal, absolutely nothing. All I had was the phone call. That should have been enough to trigger my skepticism but you see how he overcame it, right? He was over there saving me from false charges. He was my benefactor.
But at any point in the conversation, there were pointers that should have triggered me more than they did. I should have picked up on the question whether I had traveled recently. Who hasn’t traveled a bit at some point in the last six months or so? Plus what if I had said no? He would have said, hmmm, that’s telling.
I should have immediately asked why none of this is showing up in my online banking. I should have asked why I received no text regarding sketchy charges. And so on. There were many points at which I should have hung up. When he said he would need to close access to my online banking, that should have been the ultimate red flag. There is never a reason to do that.
Even after everything I know, even after having written on this scam several times, I was nearly hornswoggled.
I cannot even imagine what this must be like for older people who might be unused to this world. The reasons why scams persist is that they work. If they did not work, it would not be an industry.
The FTC logged $12.5 billion in reported consumer fraud losses in 2024, with imposter scams at $2.95 billion and government impersonation up $171 million, to $789 million. The FBI’s complaint center recorded $16.6 billion and 859,532 complaints, with call-center fraud alone at $1.9 billion.
Reported figures are a fraction of real losses, since most people never file.
We are daily faced with a plethora of plots to trick us into something. I receive several emails a day from prestigious publishers in which someone high up proposes to make me famous and rich. This one is easily spotted because the person is not using a company email. I delete them but they still arrive. Again, they must work for some people who do not know better but desperately want to be rich and famous.
Even in regular life, we are surrounded by retailers who want to upsell us, bankers who want to give us loans, mortgage brokers who want us to use their services, insurers with a pitch, and on and on it goes. The inflation of the last few years has turned free enterprise into a game of chiseling in every possible way, with mysterious charges and so on.
You know the feeling. You get two burgers and two beers and the bill comes in at $60. Astonished, you look carefully and find every kind of tax, fee, extra charge, and so on. Somehow it adds up but you cannot shake the sense that something is wrong because the burgers were only $12. Let’s say the beers are the same. You are already at $48 plus a service charge and tax and there you go.
The scam I presented above (the phone call) is the crude form, the fee stack is the polite form, and inflation is what turned every counter into a chiseler. The con doesn’t have to beat you every time. It only has to catch you once, on a bad afternoon, when the phone rings and the voice is calm and helpful and says it’s calling to save you.
It’s a particularly insidious kind of scam that exploits your cautions, very similar to the old fake virus checkers that gave you a computer virus. This is our new world and it is a dangerous one for all of us.
Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
