I was the victim of a scam.
Our company credit card had been hacked just the week before all this happened. (That’s NOT part of the scam and I still don’t know exactly how it happened.) Naturally, I was alert to fraud. So when I received a call on our business line, allegedly from the fraud department at my bank, with a helpful voice telling me that they noticed some suspicious login on the bank’s mobile app occurring in the midwest (I live in Florida), I listened.
In fact, I felt grateful that my bank was thinking of me. Hadn’t my financial institutions notified me in the past when something suspicious was happening? I think so. I don’t remember the details, though.
The voice on the other end (which didn’t sound “foreign”) described the activity that was supposedly happening. I jumped into action to help thwart this midwestern menace.
When texts started coming to me from my bank with a special six-digit code, I shared it. Why not? I could see that I had received these one-time codes in the past, so it must be legit.
The second time I was supposed to share a code, my spidey-sense started tingling. I looked at the phone number displayed on my handset. While still on the line with “fraud protection”, I googled the number. Yep. It was my bank’s fraud hotline.
But wait. Haven’t I heard about scammers spoofing numbers? Could this be a scammer spoofing the bank’s fraud department?
Mind you, I was also receiving push notifications from my bank’s phone app warning me to call a specific phone number if I wasn’t making the changes that were happening to my account. I noted the number.
Before I knew it, I was transferred to a lady to confirm recent transactions. Now I’m getting more suspicious. Again, the person on the other end of the line didn’t have an overtly noticeable accent, but it did sound like a man trying to sound like a woman. I told her that while I had her on the line, I was just going to call the fraud department number that came through my banking app. “That’s fine,” he/she assured me. But by the time I had called the fraud line, he/she had hung up.
Crap.
I knew I had been had. I waited on the line until I could speak with a member of the actual fraud department at my financial institution.With her help, I was able to take several steps to prevent a real disaster.
I consider myself pretty intelligent. I watch the Scammer Payback video channel and love the way scammers get their comeuppance at the hands of skilled and ethical anti-scammers. But I realized that if I could be bamboozled, how easy would it be for the elderly people we serve to be conned by one of these sophisticated scumbags?
I decided it was time to do a series on fraud and scams that target the elderly. Welcome to…
Scammers University (aka, SCAM U).
Over the coming months, we’ll be exposing some of the most common scams out there and how you and your loved one can be protected.
If you’re ready to get protected, click here to read the next installment in this series.
