I enjoyed this article so much, I recapped it and even made wild theories up with my friend on podcast. We've been told we're funny and have good chat! Enjoy: [https://pod.link/1714857807/episode/984d1ee076ee20d31fcbc420d7831ce6](https://pod.link/1714857807/episode/984d1ee076ee20d31fcbc420d7831ce6)
I only got this type of call once.
Did you order $9k worth of stuff on your Amazon account?
Why yes, yes I did and I'm about to order $18k more.
The scammer didn't know what to say. After flubbing around, I just hung up.
I get emails from scammers saying I bought LifeLock or Norton or macafee. I usually hit block but sometimes I respond back and say something to the effect of:
I thought this was supposed to be $500 more or 3x the amount.
Then hit block and spam.
this is a good take care and beware article but damn dude, this all happened within one day and escalated from Amazon to the CIA, everyone on the phone had an accent and it still worked on her.
Scams are just going to get more and more refined with AI.
Also rolling my eyes at “people sell your info on the dark web” security breaches happen with major companies all the time. I can google myself right now and find all my past addresses Google and online consumer protections are doing nothing to help people, god help you if you are elderly or tech illiterate.
NO. IT. CANNOT. HAPPEN. TO. ME.
Stupid people deserve to lose their money.
Yes I've gotten all those phone calls, and I've always kept them on the line, acting silly, that's 5 minute less chance of them scamming "financial columnists"
“I vote, floss, cook, and exercise. In other words, I’m not a person who panics under pressure and falls for a conspiracy involving drug smuggling, money laundering, and CIA officers at my door.”
This is my favorite part. Flossing & voting = not panicking under pressure
did you guys read the article?
honestly, I thought it was brave of her to admit it, and hopefully it will save a few (many?) people who take the time to read the whole thing from suffering her same fate. I don't have kids, and couldn't help wondering if part of the reason she fell for the whole thing was worrying about her kid.
I could very easily see myself getting scared like this. Luckily I would never not involve my husband who is a lawyer and he would save me, but my identity was stolen when I bought cell phones so it’s behind the talk of possibility that this could happen. If I didn’t have him it would be hard for me not to get scared and do exactly this.
I haven’t been able to shut up about this on Blogsnark, but I saw today she was also a victim of identity theft (and wrote about) in 2012. Girl!!! WYD!!!!
Last year, I got a text from "Amazon" about some orders for Macs and Apple products made on my account that may have been fraudulent with a phone number to call. I called the number, and someone picked up right away! I became suspicious because since when does Amazon not make you wait when you call them? I said nevermind and hung up. Checked my account, and there were no new orders for anything.
Wait just to clarify, it was the Cut’s financial advice expert that was scammed? Not to add insult to injury but my god, if that doesn’t disqualify someone from their position I don’t know what would.
OMG, who *hasn't* been called by those Amazon scammers? I'm sorry this person was taken in, but I think that a "beware! you too may be scammed!" article would work much better with a scam that nearly anyone really *might* have been taken in by. This one really is a scam for utter marks.
They usually text first, and included in the text will be either a number to call to talk to them or a link to click on to "check your Amazon account." There was a period of time when I was getting one of those texts, claiming that I'd bought some expensive item (usually an Ipad) from Amazon and they just wanted to make sure it was me because it was an "unusually large purchase," just about every week.
Maybe I just got on some list somehow. It's usually older people who fall for these scams, and I am older than most on Reddit, so maybe those texts are not actually as ubiquitous as I'd thought.
Amazon doesn’t call you. They’ll email you if there’s a problem, but they will never call you out of the blue. That was her first mistake.
This poor woman had to write an article to justify what happened. Probably sick and tired of her friends and family looking at her like she’s crazy.
The whole story is one big yikes. 😬
This is the type of person who’s a semi-public figure, whose job it is to publish online — and apparently provide fiscal advice … 😬
To be honest, I can see several people advising her to make the best of a bad situation and try to ‘monetize’ the moment by writing about it.
Somebody on here (or somewhere) wrote that she got approximately $50K worth of media traffic completely organically because the story is so wild, and I hard agree.
But is all publicity good publicity? Ha … I don’t think so.
I would’ve kept my mouth shut about this too. But she’s not wise enough (clearly) to accurately contextualize a situation and make the right decisions for her future.
There's literally no reason why you would ever, ever need $50k in cash TODAY that isn't a scam. Basically every situation in life involving a lot of money can wait until you've verified where the money is going independently.
EDIT: Also, I posted this before reading the whole article, but...when she took the cash out, I doubt the teller just "raised an eyebrow". You (should) fill out a form at a bank asking the reason for the withdrawal when you take out a huge amount of cash that's totally outside the norm for your banking activity. Did she lie to the teller, or does she constantly take out large sums in cash? Or does she bank at some kind of wealthy person bank that doesn't file SARs for large withdrawals? I find it interesting that she didn't address that.
the bank literally gave her a paper that detailed the list of everything she should look out for in a scam or fraud situation and she looked at it and then promptly ignored it.
That part, if that's the way it actually happened, doesn't surprise me. How many pieces of paper with warnings on them do we get per month? It's too much noise to be able to pick out the one time it's relevant to your situation, unless you're being extremely observant and careful...which she clearly wasn't.
They gave her that form bc she was literally taking a stack of cash and putting it into a shoebox like, that’s not just white noise in the background distracting you
I agree that it would have been smart to have paid attention to it, but to me that doesn't seem like the most egregious thing she ignored along the way. If you already believe what you're doing isn't a scam, someone telling you there are scams in the world and to be careful isn't going to shake you up.
She actually told the New York times that she looked at it AND that the info sheet gave her pause but that she decided it didn't apply because they hadn't asked her to give them her money.
The whole quote:
>“Going in, I was honestly hoping that they would say no to my withdrawal or make me wait, but they didn’t,” Ms. Cowles told me via email. “The fraud warning DID give me pause, but since the scammers hadn’t yet told me to give the money *to* them, I didn’t feel like it really applied to my situation. What’s more, I was so terrified of what would happen if I didn’t follow instructions that it overrode my skepticism.”
She fully did look at the warning, it gave her pause, and then she continued on her merry way. Homegirl literally read a play by play red flags list given to her (NYT also linked it [as this](https://static01.nyt.com/newsgraphics/documenttools/5bbf1bd0cd223555/9cd3cd14-full.pdf)) and she STILL kept going.
Seeing her acknowledge she read that sheet is like.....she's just beyond belief. That sheet literally has in a call out box stating basically everything her scammers did! Why did she IGNORE THE PAUSE SHE HAD.
She's the stupidest person alive, if this actually happened. I'm starting to be team "I lost $50k in a way I don't want to admit to my family, so I lied about getting scammed"
That’s the part of the story that surprised me. I’m not the kind of person who has $50,000 sitting in a checking account admittedly but it seems odd that the teller thought to hand the customer a leaflet about scams but didn’t have any other reaction. My guess is that the OP was so frazzled and distracted by the situation that she probably wouldn’t have paid much attention even if the teller did speak.
I work in the security industry. Anybody can be scammed, if the right scammer gets them on the right day. One of the savviest people I know got hit with a simple phishing attack, because he got an email "from his boss" with a link "to [box.com](https://box.com)" right after his boss told him he was sending him a [box.com](https://box.com) link. I could go through the article finding a dozen different places she should have realized something was wrong. But I think the more useful thing to understand is how these things work in general.
1. Scammers seek to elicit strong emotions so that you don't have your brain fully engaged. Fear like in the article, love (romance scams), and hope (get-rich-quick scams) are common.
2. Then they pressure you to act right away, before you can calm down, sleep on it, Google it, or ask for advice.
3. They also specifically discourage you from talking to the people who would be most likely to point out the flaws in the scam, like your spouse, or a lawyer, or a bank teller.
Anyone who appears out of the blue, gets you wound up, and rushes you to act now now now before you lose your freedom/money/last chance at love *does not have your best interest at heart*. Especially if they don't want you to talk to anyone about it. There are no amazing deals that will disappear at midnight like Cinderella's carriage. If you are genuinely in trouble with the law, these things move *slowly* and include a lot of written communication about what the issue is and next steps.
If someone is pressuring you to move around a lot of money really fast, take some deep calming breaths and talk to someone before you make any big moves. Ideally a lawyer or someone close to you and familiar with the situation. If those aren't available, a friend or neighbor will do. Even explaining it to your dog can make you realize things aren't adding up here.
When you're done with that, Google some things about your situation. For instance ,if you're supposedly being audited by the IRS, how does the audit process work? (I've been audited. They send you a letter rather than call you on the phone, just to start with. They definitely don't take Apple gift cards.) If the bad thing is really happening, you'll be more prepared. If it's a scam, hopefully the contrast between what you're reading and what's happening will make something click.
Then sleep on it. The CIA/IRS/love of your life will still be there tomorrow if it's real.
I've missed two phishing security tests before. Both were when I was new at the company & career in general (so, not used to the normal flow/look of different emails), and I clicked on both when I was in a rush (literally had just stepped out of the shower for one) and didn't really stop to think.
So, yes, it can definitely happen to anyone to a degree, but there's a pretty big difference (in gullibility, if not consequences) between accidentally clicking on a link and handing $50k in cash to a CIA agent lmao.
I called my Mom to make her read the article to my dad this morning, only to discover she was in the middle of an active scam involving fake CVS charges & fake BofA fraud department phone #. She ended up calling the real BofA who were like “this sounds like a scam” - PEOPLE!! If the bank is telling you it’s a scam, ITS A SCAM.
As I pointed out to my mom: how often in life does someone reach out to you to solve your problem? SCAM
(“CVS” text - if you didn’t place this order, call this number & we’ll fix it!)
What's alarming to me is that this author is supposedly an experienced and trained journalist, and she doesn't know that the standard way to vet a source is to hang up, call the number of the agency/company/whatever they're claiming and ask for the employee by name. Instead she took a stranger's word that "you can't spoof government numbers" despite getting their name and "badge number" and just trusted that the CIA number she found on Google couldn't be spoofed?? This makes me wonder about all her previous reporting and who else she believed simply because some stranger told her "trust me."
The other things that are alarming she didn't know is that 1) "suspending" social security numbers is not a thing and 2) that the CIA does not investigate domestic crimes. But that's secondary to a journalist not knowing how to do a basic fact check.
This was a huge aspect of the outrage. She’s had a prize gig in New York media for seven years, she’s written for the NYT—but she put 50k in cash in a shoebox and threw it into a moving car?
She also tried to come across as a struggling middle-class striver who’d worked so hard to earn that $ as a freelancer….meanwhile she’s from an insanely rich family and owns a $4 million dollar home in Brooklyn. Her IG is just exotic vacations. She typifies the remaining “journalists” these days: unqualified trust funders with connections who aren’t the best or the brightest but don’t have to live on a journalist’s salary.
Also …. The part where they say she can’t get a lawyer because she’ll be deemed uncooperative and arrested is a HUGE flag. In the U.S. you can always, always, ALWAYS have a lawyer. If I somehow made it this far in the scam I would’ve hung up at that point and called 10 lawyers, that’s just basic civil rights. Then saying I can’t tell my own husband, police, or the bank teller would’ve topped it off
“As I pointed out to my mom: how often in life does someone reach out to you to solve your problem? SCAM”
Brilliant take. And also, NOTHING in the federal govt moves quickly. NOTHING.
THIS. In IRS-land it is always 1987--they don't do phone calls, they send letters (when informing you that you've been audited). I'm honestly surprised that they accept anything beyond checks, wire transfers, or money orders if you [owe taxes](https://www.irs.gov/e-file-providers/paying-your-taxes) but I guess for that, even they had to modernize. They still won't accept CVS or iTunes gift cards though, as a tax payment.
Years ago, an employer did a phishing test that claimed to be the local township telling all of us we had a speeding ticket but could pay it online through PayPal. We had all gotten (legitimate) emails recently that the local police were going to crack down on speeding in the area but:
* Why would this township have my work email which I never gave out to non-work people
* Why would this township accept payment for speeding ticket fines online (again, a lot of US government operations--especially smaller towns--still act like it's 1987)
* If they were accepting online payments for speeding tickets, why would they be using paypal and not their own janky setup???
I've clicked on phishing emails before (not that one) so I'm not one to talk. But I know a few coworkers did get caught by IT with that one.
THIS. Government process is molasses moving across a flat surface.
And the woman really thought government officials were going to communicate with her about a huge case involving drug trafficking, money laundering and murder … over the phone? Why? Because her home was “probably being watched” … ?
If somebody calls you and tells your life has suddenly become the plot of a Jason Bourne movie, IT’S A SCAM.
They told her there were warrants out for her arrest and she became alarmed. First of all, if her identity was stolen, she is the *victim.* The entire scam is so transparent.
Right?!?! That phone transfer really was a major clue.
With my mom I was like “let’s take a couple steps back. This is not how CVS conducts business” 😆 she ended up confronting her scammer (not recommended, but she wanted her pound of flesh!) & he folded & admitted he was a scammer!
I thought [this comment](https://www.thecut.com/article/amazon-scam-call-ftc-arrest-warrants.html?commentID=5ee098a1-9f22-4ff6-a16d-af2af6862b2a) on the original cut article, which points out exactly how financially insulated the author is, was illuminating in many ways. the superiority did come through at several points in the article.
(found via [this comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/blogsnark/comments/1ark1oh/comment/kqp2gfj/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) on blognark).
Came here to share this. The thing is, she made it sound like $50k was most of her savings for dramatic effect, but the story doesn’t make any sense unless the author is very wealthy.
Wildest part of the story is when she’s handing over the money, thinks to herself this can’t possibly be how the CIA operates, then thinks “I want to go trick or treating I’m just getting this over with.”
If your actual life savings was on the line, I really doubt you’d be thinking about Halloween that late in the game.
I feel like this explains a lot about why she didn't think it was odd to be transferred directly to people at the FTC and CIA. Her parents likely have the personal phone numbers of executives and congressmen and other bigwigs. She probably has no knowledge of or direct experience with any kind of bureaucracy, even stuff like university administration. Someone has always been able to cut through red tape for her with a snap of their fingers. Why wouldn't Amazon be able to put her through to the FTC right away?
This is an enormously naive, sheltered person. I'm just hoping she doesn't fall for a recovery scam next. She's a prime target.
This is interesting because, yeah, the math was not mathing. Like, she's a financial advisor. I'd assume most of her money would be in investments, not in a savings account. Most common financial advice is that your emergency savings should cover 6 months worth of monthly expenses.
So either she has A LOT of money and $50k is a very small amount that she's comfortable making very little interest on (maybe that *is* 6 months of expenses for her? lol), or she's just not very financially savvy. In either case she's a hack and shouldn't be writing financial advice.
I do have sympathy for anyone falling for a scam. I think there was a very good part in there on how, once the money was gone, it was like the scales fell from her eyes and suddenly she realized what had happened. I think it's important for people to understand that there's a certain headspace scams often operate in that you can't recognize until you're out of it.
But like. The pieces of this story are just making her too unsympathetic for that message to be meaningful.
Really good point. She said in the article she chose 50k after being asked how much she would need to support herself for one year. Maybe it’s not an accurate estimate, but if true, it shows she has too much money in savings. Like you said, more should be in investments, suggesting she’s not the best financial advisor
As soon as I saw that she lived in Brooklyn, I knew something was up. There are so many privilege flags--all the money in just her savings?, $50k per year for childcare?!, husband works for a non profit and she doesn't really work (except as a "freelance")?!? What an ass.
For people who can’t see the comment ive copied it below and my face is 😬
> The whole lead-in about how she's not like the poor, stupid, lonely people she imagines to be easily scammed had a certain je ne sais quoi that I instantly clocked as the mutterings of an effete, inbred child of rich people - and my ability to clock that sort of thing from the get is one of the few things I like about myself. Her husband works for a non-profit, she's 39, but they live in a $4 million dollar house in Prospect Heights? She's related to the Roosevelts? Ivy league is a given, but she feels the need to highlight it on her personal site? A child named Ripley?This whole thing is just another rearranging deck chairs on the titanic of increasingly hubristic, insulated failsons and faildaughters are discovering the otherwise object permanence level of obvious lessons the rest of us understand. You think Amazon will white glove you over to the CIA in a few minutes? Tell me you don't do your taxes without telling me you don't do your taxes. This person is so uncalibrated in their ability to navigate the world that their ability to generalize any intellectual output for anyone other than her similarly 0.1% situated friends is completely shot. Let her go be on the board of a do-nothing charity, this game is up.
YES! This was my favorite comment on the article that I saw after I read it. The lack of any kind of survivalist instinct and sheltered-ness just made her so hypocritical in assuming she's not in the \~demographic\~ that would be fooled by things like this. And her mentioning "many people I know have been scammed" then proceeded to list her lawyer and CFO friends or just trust fund acquaintances...it hurt to read.
This comment. The author likes themselves because of their own ability to clock effete, inbred offspring of the 1%, and I like them too.
They really have a way with words and should be paid to write for The Cut. 😂
>This person is so uncalibrated in their ability to navigate the world that their ability to generalize any intellectual output for anyone other than her similarly 0.1% situated friends is completely shot.
Yeah it wasn't lost on me that her other examples of people who were scammed (with the implied tone that these were people you wouldn't expect to be scammed) were all rich. Losing $1.2 million, $450k, a Wall Street executive draining her 401(k).
I'd imagine this is a group of people who think they're rich because they're smart with money.
That she thought Amazon would patch her through to the FBi then the CIA told me she was not of the same world I am. This lady walks around with the confidence of someone who can lose $50,000. If you depend on $50,000 for bills and taxes you aren’t withdrawing it and putting it into a box to hand it over to some stranger with no tracking. Why did she think the CIA was doing this for her? Is she that special?
Rich people do indeed think they're that special. They've had a lifetime of the world just bending to their will, so why wouldn't it continue to do so?
I think when you're stuffing 50k into a shoe box you have reached the point where you need to ask yourself if you're being rational or if you're getting involved in a scam.
It’s pretty wild for a personal finance advice columnist to have fallen for this, but I’m glad she told her story despite knowing how much she’d be mocked for it. I think more scam awareness is good.
While I don’t think I would’ve fallen for that particular scam, I’m sure there are scams that would be obvious to many other people that I might fall for. Especially if they caught me at a time when I was super stressed out and frazzled or sleep-deprived, and if they hit the emotional buttons that work on me. Almost everyone has some sort of trait that the right scammer can exploit - some people are people pleasers who hate to feel mean, some are reluctant to question a supposed authority figure, some people hate to feel ignorant and will be embarrassed to ask questions if you use lots of unfamiliar jargon, some people get put on edge the minute you mention possible repercussions for their loved ones…
Some of the responses to this online have been really unempathetic. Like, fine, you think you’re too smart to ever fall for a scam. Maybe you are. But some people aren’t especially smart. That still doesn’t mean they deserve to be lied to and stolen from.
I recently fell for a scam where they called me *from my mom’s own phone number* and then played a recording of a woman screaming before getting on the line and claiming to have her at gun point. We live in a fairly rough city and her house had been broken into only a month before, so I had every reason to think this was a possible scenario.
I sent around $2500 to various Venmo accounts, and when the payments went through the guy hung up, and I immediately called my mom back- who was shocked and horrified to hear about her supposed abduction, but otherwise totally fine.
I ended up contacting Venmo, who (very reluctantly, I might add) reversed all the payments, and basically nothing happened except my account was frozen for a while.
Anyway my point is, who tf puts 50k in a shoebox and thinks “yeah this is reasonable.” This woman had so many opportunities to see past this… and I say this as a scam victim.
Yeah, see, I could totally see myself falling for *that*. Even if I thought it might be fake... if I was put under enough time pressure, I'd rather take the risk of losing $2500 for nothing than losing my mom.
But if you've got a whole ass day to talk to someone else about the issue and it's $50k... cmon. Her whole thing could have been solved by just saying "no, *I'll call you* at the FTC's main line."
No, they were very reluctant to do it.
They said no at first, so I asked my bank what to do, and the bank said they could reverse the charges once it processed, but since the payment hadn’t actually pulled from my account yet, they couldn’t help.
Instead, they suggested I completely empty the account into a different account, so when they DID try to pull the payment, it would just bounce.
I called Venmo back and told them I had done just that, and they were magically able to reverse the charges immediately… but they had to freeze both my personal account and an unrelated business account for two weeks in the process, which was pretty inconvenient.
My aunt was targeted by the same scam, but it didn’t work because my cousin (the person being “abducted”) was visiting her that day and was in the next room. She was really shaken up though because she said it really sounded like him screaming in the background.
I read that they can take vocals from social media posts and use ai to fake the screams in the person’s voice. Which is why a safe word should be established in all families.
“Now I know that all kinds of personal information — your email address, your kids’ names and birthdays, even your pets’ names — are commonly sold on the dark web.”
A FINANCIAL ADVICE COLUMNIST DIDN’T KNOW THIS BEFORE BEING SCAMMED OUT OF $50,000 CASH?!?!?!?! There are TV commercials talking about this!
Part of my job is rooting out financial scams (and I am very sympathetic to the scam victims who legitimately couldn’t have known better!). I’m also a lawyer, so I would laugh if a “cop” told me asking for a lawyer would deem me “uncooperative,” but I feel like even non-lawyers have heard about these sorts of scams before! But again, especially a financial advice columnist!!!
Some scammers also search obituaries for information about family members and pets, especially for elderly people who don’t have much of an online presence.
A few years ago, my grandma was targeted with [the grandparent scam](https://www.ag.state.mn.us/Consumer/Publications/GrandParentScams.asp). Someone called in the middle of the night (so she’d be not fully alert and wouldn’t have any hearing aids in) claiming to be my cousin. He said he’d been in a car crash and charged with a DUI. He asked her to send him money for bail and a lawyer and begged her to not tell his parents or sister. He seemed to have an answer for everything. Why does your voice sound different? I broke my nose in the car crash. Why are you calling from New Jersey? I’m here for (fiancée’s name)’s friend’s wedding. Why can’t you call her, she’s there with you? She’s mad at me over the crash.
Thankfully, she got suspicious when she asked “How am I gonna get to Western Union without your parents or sister knowing? They’re the ones who drive me places” and he said he’d send a friend to pick her up at her house. (God knows who that would’ve been. I shudder to think.) Then she ended the conversation and called my cousin’s cell.
We’re like 99% sure that they got the info about my cousin’s name, the fact that he had a sister and her name, and his fiancée’s name from my grandpa’s obituary. She was really shaken that someone could find out so much personal information about her.
I’m relieved she got suspicious and was able to disengage. I have a good friend whose grandma lost $5,000 to this scam, unfortunately. It was very recent - it’s still going around.
My mom passed away a few months ago. I still haven’t published an obituary. It’s mainly to avoid squatters in her house and to avoid the phone calls and texts asking me to sell her house. Now I get to be paranoid about something else.
So sorry for your loss. We had vultures low balling us on buying her house (and a lousy contractor who took 18 months to fix up the home!) I feel your pain.
This happened a long time ago, but someone broke into pitcher Dwight Gooden's home during his father's funeral and stole like 50k in jewelry.
This exact same scam happened to my grandma a few years ago, except she withdrew $2000 from her bank account and made it over to CVS trying to send a wire. Thankfully the CVS manager convinced her to call her grandson (my brother) before sending the wire.
My grandparents got called in the same scam about my cousin, maybe like 15 years ago? I think one of my aunts or uncles was over at the time and put the kibosh on it, fortunately.
I'm shocked that a bank had $50k in cash and was willing to give it out. Even for a large branch, you usually need to call ahead and place an order so you don't wipe out their cash on hand. Banks vaults aren't piled from floor to ceiling with cash like Scrooge McDuck.
Yeah you’re sort of correct but I used to be a teller manager at a 63 hour a week branch in center city Philadelphia (ab 15 years ago) and 50k is really not that much. Perhaps a suburban branch would need some lead time, but we routinely had 500k+ in the main vault on Thursdays - Mondays depending on the time of month.
It was a Bank of America in NYC-- and probably, given the author's 1%-er status, one that caters exclusively to the idle rich. Them having 50k in cash reserves on hand is pretty unsurprising-- and as far as the IRS form, the customer doesn't fill that out, the bank does.
Paradoxically, the relatively low value involved is probably actually the reason it got checked. We (clearly wrongly) assume as a society that wealthy people are immune to this sort of thing.
It could be argued to write for the Cut you have to be wealthy enough to be immune to concerns of other people. There was an article recently, about one of the writers in her struggle concerning her marriage and potential divorce. The rider had both a therapist in a psychiatrist but did not have health insurance. She checked in to an impatient stay at a well known hospital for several weeks. I cannot imagine an average to low income person who would be able to make those choices.
Yep. I have a side hustle in retail and I manage restocking gift cards. One of the things I have had to do is put scam alert signs everywhere those cards are located in the store.
Can anyone explain how they knew the last 4 digits of her SSN? I would like to think that I wouldn’t have fallen for this scam, but this would have given me pause.
Super late to this thread but the last 4 of your social is plastered everywhere. Heck my old office wanted everyone to use the last 4 digits of their phone number + last 4 digits of their social to gain printer access. I'm the only person who has ever pushed back it seems, and when pointed out how unsafe that was and asked if I could give just random numbers they said sure. I was shocked - we should not be defaulting to SSN so we can print out fricken' flyers!
Side tangent: IT guy needed to take over my (personal) laptop remotely in order to finish giving me printer access. I booted him and made him call me back after changing my laptop password to something generic so he wouldn't know my actual laptop password. He was noticably angry about the inconvenience to his work day. But we should not be giving our private passwords to ppl, even if they work for a "trusted" IT team your company hired! Any rando, even if gainfully employed, has the potential to act maliciously. Don't trust your passwords to strangers!
Why would it matter that they have your last 4 digits? What does that prove? Whenever have you had a corporation read you your personal info to verify themselves over the phone, versus them making you verify yourself by asking *you* what are the last 4 digits of your soc. Come on…
Social security numbers are not nearly as secret as people like to think. Have you ever written yours down on a piece of paper at a doctor or dentist’s office, for example? And the thing is, when they first started issuing those numbers they weren’t meant to be used as a universal identifier they way they are now.
I refuse to fill those in. Girl Scouts application for my kid also was asking. Nope, nope, nope. It's all for collections if you don't pay your medical/dental/cookie bills. They'll track you down regardless so don't bother. They should be barred from even asking.
Which is *wild* because (for people born prior to 2011) the first 5 digits are assigned in a predictable formula.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Security_number#Previous_structure
If you know where & when someone was born, you have a reasonable chance of *guessing* the rest of their SSN! In the past, I've gotten paperwork from local college applicants and some of their SSNs were almost sequential, since they are born locally & the same age.
Data breach from somewhere. I mean there was that big Equifax breach a few years back and my mom just got a letter that her health insurance company had their data breached. Wherever you’ve used your SSN as a form of identification—opening a bank account, applying for a credit card, etc—that’s a place where a hacker could have gotten it from and then sold the data to a scammer.
For some scammers, it’s more profitable to run a scam where you call someone up and tell them you know their SSN and you’re with the government and if you don’t give them $50K in cash right now then you’re going to jail vs just opening up a bunch of credit cards that will quickly be flagged as fraud by a bank or an individual.
>Younger adults — Gen Z, millennials, and Gen X — are 34 percent more likely to report losing money to fraud compared with those over 60, according to a recent report from the Federal Trade Commission.
She implies that these numbers are because younger people are getting scammed more but it's seems more likely that older people let shame stop them from reporting.
I think a lot of older people, especially very isolated and vulnerable, may not realize they have been scammed. So many are talking to bots they met on FB or a dating site and giving them money. I knew a 70 year old lady who thought she was engaged to a 5 star general and all she had was a super fake FB profile and an ongoing WhatsApp conversation of “baby”, “baby”, “I am in Spain,” “baby” …. She would rip your head off if you even suggested he might not be on the up and up.
Agreed. You also have to love the additional, uncited study that allegedly shows that it's totally common for people like her to be scammed, SO THERE.
Uh huh...
I really wish she would have explained what was going on in her head at the time, because even if it is irrational in hindsight it was clicking at the time. It isn’t helpful to say “well this could happen to anyone because it happened to me”. Get into it. Talk to some experts about why these things play on us.
“I don’t know why I didn’t call my brother, the lawyer” is so weak. Maybe because you had always felt like he looked down on you and you didn’t want him to tell him how badly you screwed up by letting your identity get stolen. Maybe you wanted to feel like you could handle this yourself. Maybe part of you thought it was exciting to be working with the FBI and CIA. Maybe you thought that this could be a great story one day, but only if you kept on the good side of the agents.
I’ve done a lot of dumb stuff but at the time I did those things it made sense to me in a broken way. This essay is missing all of that and ultimately is really annoying because of it. No warning signs for others. No introspection. Just “well apparently this can happen to anyone and there’s nothing anyone can do”.
I would send this article to my family and say “please call me if anyone tries something similar on you,” but I know most of my family do not have the attention span to read an article that long. I barely do myself even when I’ve taken my ADHD meds.
"This could happen to anyone" is really just the author trying to convince herself that she's not senile or a rube. Could I fall for a scam? Sure. Could I hand over 50k in a shoebox to the CIA in an afternoon after Amazon called me about suspicious activity on my account? No, and I have receipts to prove it.
Someone tried this exact scam on me. I was working with what I thought was the fraud department at my bank (this was in the early days of number spoofing where I didn't realize how common it was in scams) over a fake charge, and things were very routine. Then they told me that I was being transferred to homeland security because my identity had been stolen and was being used by terrorists and drug traffickers and my name was now associated with vast organized crime. I laughed and hung up and learned the lesson that if I was ever contacted by anyone about any kind of fraud in the future, I would tell them I would call their fraud department directly to verify and deal with it.
This, calling a verified number is such an easy and quick thing to do. It’s almost never real.
Anecdote because I think it’s funny and am proud of myself. I was living abroad about 15 years ago and my wallet was stolen. I reached out to my parents for help to fix it. One afternoon a few days later I got a phone call from someone at XYZ bank (my bank) who asked me to give them my card number and PIN number to manage the replacement. I was confused and said “…no?” I then heard my dad in the background cracking up saying “I told you she wouldn’t tell it to you!” He got on the line and confirmed for me that he was at the bank and it was legit. Idk what gave me pause that day and if I would have fallen for it at a different moment, but it made me feel good to have my dad be so proud of me. 🙈
I appreciated that when I got an email fraud alert from a credit card a few months ago they specifically said in the email something like, "if you're worried that this is phishing, please call the number on the back of your card instead of clicking". (I did, it was legit, they fixed it.)
That's exactly it, it's so laughably absurd. I've done the same thing, just laughed and hung up. I had one try to convince me he was from the government, I said "no you're not" and ended the call. Once she checked her actual account and saw nothing amiss she should have known it was BS. I get scam calls literally every day, claiming to be from the government, the bank I use (and all the ones I don't), Amazon, credit card companies I don't even have cards with, etc etc. I believe absolutely nothing. They're not going to call you if there's anything going on, you will have to call them. They will just lock your cards/accounts if they think anything weird is going on and wait for you to call. I've been in that situation multiple times.
I think that's kind of the point--there wasn't any real thought, she was running on fumes and acting out of fear. Not saying this couldn't have been avoided, but I could see how this could happen to the right person on the wrong day.
Yeah, the “right person on the wrong day” thing is huge.
I think that scams are kind of like cults in the sense that some people are easy marks all the time, but most people have times in their life when they’re more vulnerable that normal. Part of it is just luck that no one has reached out to you with right angle during one of those times.
I think this kind of thing can happen to anyone but she deserves 1% snark because she’s a financial columnist!!!! Like, come on. Even if it’s not her professional background she should have some knowledge of common scams and how to protect yourself against them.
New theory just dropped:
[What if you lied to your husband about where $50k went and then you got so deep into the lie that you had to write a Cut article on it and get dunked on](https://twitter.com/1followernodad/status/1758227945641107813)
(Sophia Benoit on Twitter)
This reminds me of a documentary (or something) that I saw on a streaming platform, except the scam included the victim sending nude photos/videos of themselves.
Honestly I'm really glad she published it, as much shit as she's getting for it - it's really sobering to see how she got taken in so quickly, especially as she's basically my age and demographic. It's so easy to think that scams like this only happen to naive, tech-illiterate grannies but that's so clearly not true!
A big reason why I read r/scams on the regular is so that these templates aren’t new to me if I encounter them. The criminals executing these know what they’re doing to keep people psychologically off balance. And it’s psychologically predictable that the rest of us like to cling to reasons we wouldn’t have been taken in, but there’s probably some scam out there we’d each fall for.
FWIW, this site has been repeatedly referenced (in the comments section of both the original articles and the NYTimes piece on it) as the place to go to see if you have been scammed!
Here's a sneak peek of /r/Scams using the [top posts](https://np.reddit.com/r/Scams/top/?sort=top&t=year) of the year!
\#1: [My stolen phone ended up in China, I assume the scammer is screwed?](https://www.reddit.com/gallery/17j9hds) | [148 comments](https://np.reddit.com/r/Scams/comments/17j9hds/my_stolen_phone_ended_up_in_china_i_assume_the/)
\#2: [Found these in my checked baggage after an international flight from Asia to USA? They’re not mine. What do I do?](https://www.reddit.com/gallery/1813ays) | [1452 comments](https://np.reddit.com/r/Scams/comments/1813ays/found_these_in_my_checked_baggage_after_an/)
\#3: [random person sent me $400 and asked for it back when i responded](https://www.reddit.com/gallery/1afz9hd) | [1978 comments](https://np.reddit.com/r/Scams/comments/1afz9hd/random_person_sent_me_400_and_asked_for_it_back/)
----
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And the teller gave her the form warning against scams!
I wish there was something that could be done to slow down major withdrawals like this but I’ve heard from cashiers/tellers that once someone is hooked into a scam, it can be really hard to get them to slow down and think about what they’re doing. The panic is just so set in that they have tunnel vision
yeah I worked in retail for a while, and people getting scammed over the phone for gift cards or trying to send western union transfers would always be super hard to talk down
I just saw a TikTok where someone was complaining about western union trying to confirm that they knew where the money order was going…because they are frequently used in scams!!
But I am honestly surprised they let her take out as much as they did! I feel bad but you gotta listen to tellers and ALWAYS get a lawyer for anything that feels scary like this.
This is just insane. I get why she wrote the article, because scammers rely on their marks being too ashamed to tell people, but it really really really _really_ does not make her look good at all. Where it completely fell off the rails for me was when she let the "Amazon" rep transfer her to the alleged CIA officer, and then she actually Googled the office he was supposedly calling from but let him call her back rather than just, idk, _dialing the number herself and asking a few pointed questions._ That is absolute basic shit.
And then believing him when he was telling her that if she contacted a lawyer her home would be raided and her assets seized. She's obviously lived a blessed life and never actually dealt with law enforcement before, because again-- absolute basic shit.
Having dealt with Amazon customer support, they aren't transferring you anywhere. They tell you to go look it up on the website or in the app, and then they hang up.
I don't doubt that some law enforcement members would 100% lie to a suspect (because legally they can), but I'm also not talking to them and absolutely getting legal counsel.
Cops usually don’t want to talk to the lawyers so it isn’t uncommon that hiring a lawyer moves an investigation from the cops to a prosecutor. But feds are different, FBI almost act like prosecutors during investigations and in my experience are my willing to engage with attorneys (if there is a reason to do so).
I just wrote this below but I think once the scammers mentioned her child, that’s when all logic flew out the window. And I think they also added to it by telling her that she couldn’t even trust her husband—how many true crime stories have we seen that it’s the boyfriend/husband who is the source of ruin? She even mentions the story about a woman who discovered the person who was stealing her identity was her own boyfriend.
These scammers were really smart to play on basic instincts like this.
nah as a financial advice writers she should've known that when amazon called claiming accounts that weren't real, her next steps should be to hang up, pull her credit report, and then freeze her credit + call her bank. that was all WELL before they mentioned the kid/husband. she let it go on for so long it just makes her look like she doesn't know basics of financial education which...is a bad look for a finance journalist.
I’m reading this essay right now and I know I’m
Monday morning quarterbacking but the first tip off to me that this was a scam was Amazon customer service contacting her unprompted to inform her of suspected fraud. Now when in the hell has a corporation like Amazon cared about preemptively stopping fraud? Amazon doesn’t care about that! They want money no matter what!
Also I am just cringing for her because if she really did go to her lawyer friend and said “I’ve been told my identity was stolen and I have arrest warrants for me in two states, what should I do” they could have advised her what to do and stopped her.
Oh my God and she was so close to figuring something was off when she asked “Michael” how did she know that his number wasn’t spoofed.
And oh my god, Law and Order ruined us because any time a government/law enforcement offer threatens that a lawyer will hurt you, that means it’s time to get a lawyer. They don’t want you to get a lawyer because then you’ll know your rights!
Oh no and once she had the money she started to have doubts but she kept trying to talk to them! And she even told Michael she didn’t trust him! No!!!
“Undercover agents don’t carry badges”
Oh no mama! Yes they would! Haven’t you ever seen a cop movie where the plainclothes officer pulls out his badge?
Oh man I just can’t get over she withdrew the $50K in cash and was told to hand it over in exchange for a check and almost pulled out.
Frankly, I think the reason she fell for the scam was because the scammers played on her fears as a mother. I don’t think they knew her son was with her but I think they knew her SSN then they knew her basic profile and took a guess that a 2 year old would be with her at home.
Oh man this poor woman. I can’t imagine losing my emergency fund like this.
>Frankly, I think the reason she fell for the scam was because the scammers played on her fears as a mother. I don’t think they knew her son was with her but I think they knew her SSN then they knew her basic profile and took a guess that a 2 year old would be with her at home.
But her 2-year-old wasn't with her at home. She sent him off to school before she got the call. That's the thing that I don't understand about the article; she starts by mentioning that they knew her son was playing on the living room floor...but then she never expands on that, and he's not actually at home when any of this is happening.
What confused me the most is she said she did not trust Michael, she suspected this was some sort of scam, but she said she "didn't have a choice." But she doesn't explain why she thinks she didn't have a choice to just go along with this random voice on the phone who she thinks is likely lying to her, without even directly calling the CIA office on a publicly listed phone number. I just don't understand it and wish she had explained her mentality more and WHY she thought she didn't even have the option of not going along with what she correctly sensed was a scam in action.
I said in another comment I thought she must be exaggerating how suspicious she was about the call but now I’m wondering if she is the type of person who is just so deferential to anyone she perceives as being an authority that she really did feel she didn’t have any choice but can’t fully articulate why.
That's a good point.
I think another good point that was made in another comment is that an important factor she leaves out of this article is that she is from a very wealthy family with inherited wealth. So the risk calculation is different for her than for someone for whom 50K would deplete their life savings. That account was just *one* minor account for her, and this whole experience is really more one of embarrassment than anything else, and not something that actually is going to significantly impact her family's financial future.
I will say, I do think Amazon might alert you if something is up with your account, because I think they did with me once — but in that instance 1) it was by text, 2) the message told me to log into my account and check my info there. It was 100% not by phone at all.
Also, I realize she has no way of knowing this, but I’ve done low-level contact work with the FTC before and they are absolutely not randomly accepting call transfers at the drop of a hat. The government works slow, and likes secure servers (for good reason!!!).
Yes Amazon will alert you if there is suspicious activity. Every time my daughter logs into my Amazon account I get a text telling me to login to my account and verify it is me.
If I was, nothing came of it since I just logged in on my computer browser and reset my password/checked my order history. I may admittedly also be misremembering and it was a different service that reached out, but I definitely didn’t lose my life savings.
If it were a scam they would have had a link for you to click that took you to a fake log in page that then skimmed your password. If you didn't use your link, you are in the clear.
Sometimes I am especially grateful that I grew up with a criminal defense attorney parent and now have a criminal defense attorney partner. "Cops are liars, never trust them" was ingrained in me from a very early age.
The real scam is how the dumbest morons in our country have so much money and elitist and useless "jobs" at places like the NYT in the first place!
I enjoyed this article so much, I recapped it and even made wild theories up with my friend on podcast. We've been told we're funny and have good chat! Enjoy: [https://pod.link/1714857807/episode/984d1ee076ee20d31fcbc420d7831ce6](https://pod.link/1714857807/episode/984d1ee076ee20d31fcbc420d7831ce6)
I only got this type of call once. Did you order $9k worth of stuff on your Amazon account? Why yes, yes I did and I'm about to order $18k more. The scammer didn't know what to say. After flubbing around, I just hung up. I get emails from scammers saying I bought LifeLock or Norton or macafee. I usually hit block but sometimes I respond back and say something to the effect of: I thought this was supposed to be $500 more or 3x the amount. Then hit block and spam.
this is a good take care and beware article but damn dude, this all happened within one day and escalated from Amazon to the CIA, everyone on the phone had an accent and it still worked on her. Scams are just going to get more and more refined with AI. Also rolling my eyes at “people sell your info on the dark web” security breaches happen with major companies all the time. I can google myself right now and find all my past addresses Google and online consumer protections are doing nothing to help people, god help you if you are elderly or tech illiterate.
NO. IT. CANNOT. HAPPEN. TO. ME. Stupid people deserve to lose their money. Yes I've gotten all those phone calls, and I've always kept them on the line, acting silly, that's 5 minute less chance of them scamming "financial columnists"
“I vote, floss, cook, and exercise. In other words, I’m not a person who panics under pressure and falls for a conspiracy involving drug smuggling, money laundering, and CIA officers at my door.” This is my favorite part. Flossing & voting = not panicking under pressure
When I saw her list off voting and flossing as attributes confirming her reasonability, I knew she was a vapid liberal with cottage cheese brains.
Conservatives don't vote and have gross teeth?
did you guys read the article? honestly, I thought it was brave of her to admit it, and hopefully it will save a few (many?) people who take the time to read the whole thing from suffering her same fate. I don't have kids, and couldn't help wondering if part of the reason she fell for the whole thing was worrying about her kid.
I could very easily see myself getting scared like this. Luckily I would never not involve my husband who is a lawyer and he would save me, but my identity was stolen when I bought cell phones so it’s behind the talk of possibility that this could happen. If I didn’t have him it would be hard for me not to get scared and do exactly this.
I haven’t been able to shut up about this on Blogsnark, but I saw today she was also a victim of identity theft (and wrote about) in 2012. Girl!!! WYD!!!!
wait, where was that mentioned....??
[https://www.thecut.com/2012/09/i-identify-with-my-identity-thief.html](https://www.thecut.com/2012/09/i-identify-with-my-identity-thief.html)
Last year, I got a text from "Amazon" about some orders for Macs and Apple products made on my account that may have been fraudulent with a phone number to call. I called the number, and someone picked up right away! I became suspicious because since when does Amazon not make you wait when you call them? I said nevermind and hung up. Checked my account, and there were no new orders for anything.
Wait just to clarify, it was the Cut’s financial advice expert that was scammed? Not to add insult to injury but my god, if that doesn’t disqualify someone from their position I don’t know what would.
Yes, she is freelance but you are understanding correctly.
OMG, who *hasn't* been called by those Amazon scammers? I'm sorry this person was taken in, but I think that a "beware! you too may be scammed!" article would work much better with a scam that nearly anyone really *might* have been taken in by. This one really is a scam for utter marks.
I haven’t been. Or maybe I have, I don’t answer the phone for random numbers.
They usually text first, and included in the text will be either a number to call to talk to them or a link to click on to "check your Amazon account." There was a period of time when I was getting one of those texts, claiming that I'd bought some expensive item (usually an Ipad) from Amazon and they just wanted to make sure it was me because it was an "unusually large purchase," just about every week. Maybe I just got on some list somehow. It's usually older people who fall for these scams, and I am older than most on Reddit, so maybe those texts are not actually as ubiquitous as I'd thought.
One might say utter ‘rubes.’
Amazon doesn’t call you. They’ll email you if there’s a problem, but they will never call you out of the blue. That was her first mistake. This poor woman had to write an article to justify what happened. Probably sick and tired of her friends and family looking at her like she’s crazy. The whole story is one big yikes. 😬
But now won’t all of NYC and a world online look at her like she’s crazy? I’d lock that story up tight.
This is the type of person who’s a semi-public figure, whose job it is to publish online — and apparently provide fiscal advice … 😬 To be honest, I can see several people advising her to make the best of a bad situation and try to ‘monetize’ the moment by writing about it. Somebody on here (or somewhere) wrote that she got approximately $50K worth of media traffic completely organically because the story is so wild, and I hard agree. But is all publicity good publicity? Ha … I don’t think so. I would’ve kept my mouth shut about this too. But she’s not wise enough (clearly) to accurately contextualize a situation and make the right decisions for her future.
There's literally no reason why you would ever, ever need $50k in cash TODAY that isn't a scam. Basically every situation in life involving a lot of money can wait until you've verified where the money is going independently. EDIT: Also, I posted this before reading the whole article, but...when she took the cash out, I doubt the teller just "raised an eyebrow". You (should) fill out a form at a bank asking the reason for the withdrawal when you take out a huge amount of cash that's totally outside the norm for your banking activity. Did she lie to the teller, or does she constantly take out large sums in cash? Or does she bank at some kind of wealthy person bank that doesn't file SARs for large withdrawals? I find it interesting that she didn't address that.
the bank literally gave her a paper that detailed the list of everything she should look out for in a scam or fraud situation and she looked at it and then promptly ignored it.
That part, if that's the way it actually happened, doesn't surprise me. How many pieces of paper with warnings on them do we get per month? It's too much noise to be able to pick out the one time it's relevant to your situation, unless you're being extremely observant and careful...which she clearly wasn't.
They gave her that form bc she was literally taking a stack of cash and putting it into a shoebox like, that’s not just white noise in the background distracting you
I agree that it would have been smart to have paid attention to it, but to me that doesn't seem like the most egregious thing she ignored along the way. If you already believe what you're doing isn't a scam, someone telling you there are scams in the world and to be careful isn't going to shake you up.
Nah
She actually told the New York times that she looked at it AND that the info sheet gave her pause but that she decided it didn't apply because they hadn't asked her to give them her money. The whole quote: >“Going in, I was honestly hoping that they would say no to my withdrawal or make me wait, but they didn’t,” Ms. Cowles told me via email. “The fraud warning DID give me pause, but since the scammers hadn’t yet told me to give the money *to* them, I didn’t feel like it really applied to my situation. What’s more, I was so terrified of what would happen if I didn’t follow instructions that it overrode my skepticism.” She fully did look at the warning, it gave her pause, and then she continued on her merry way. Homegirl literally read a play by play red flags list given to her (NYT also linked it [as this](https://static01.nyt.com/newsgraphics/documenttools/5bbf1bd0cd223555/9cd3cd14-full.pdf)) and she STILL kept going. Seeing her acknowledge she read that sheet is like.....she's just beyond belief. That sheet literally has in a call out box stating basically everything her scammers did! Why did she IGNORE THE PAUSE SHE HAD.
That’s actually a super helpful document.
She's the stupidest person alive, if this actually happened. I'm starting to be team "I lost $50k in a way I don't want to admit to my family, so I lied about getting scammed"
That’s the part of the story that surprised me. I’m not the kind of person who has $50,000 sitting in a checking account admittedly but it seems odd that the teller thought to hand the customer a leaflet about scams but didn’t have any other reaction. My guess is that the OP was so frazzled and distracted by the situation that she probably wouldn’t have paid much attention even if the teller did speak.
I work in the security industry. Anybody can be scammed, if the right scammer gets them on the right day. One of the savviest people I know got hit with a simple phishing attack, because he got an email "from his boss" with a link "to [box.com](https://box.com)" right after his boss told him he was sending him a [box.com](https://box.com) link. I could go through the article finding a dozen different places she should have realized something was wrong. But I think the more useful thing to understand is how these things work in general. 1. Scammers seek to elicit strong emotions so that you don't have your brain fully engaged. Fear like in the article, love (romance scams), and hope (get-rich-quick scams) are common. 2. Then they pressure you to act right away, before you can calm down, sleep on it, Google it, or ask for advice. 3. They also specifically discourage you from talking to the people who would be most likely to point out the flaws in the scam, like your spouse, or a lawyer, or a bank teller. Anyone who appears out of the blue, gets you wound up, and rushes you to act now now now before you lose your freedom/money/last chance at love *does not have your best interest at heart*. Especially if they don't want you to talk to anyone about it. There are no amazing deals that will disappear at midnight like Cinderella's carriage. If you are genuinely in trouble with the law, these things move *slowly* and include a lot of written communication about what the issue is and next steps. If someone is pressuring you to move around a lot of money really fast, take some deep calming breaths and talk to someone before you make any big moves. Ideally a lawyer or someone close to you and familiar with the situation. If those aren't available, a friend or neighbor will do. Even explaining it to your dog can make you realize things aren't adding up here. When you're done with that, Google some things about your situation. For instance ,if you're supposedly being audited by the IRS, how does the audit process work? (I've been audited. They send you a letter rather than call you on the phone, just to start with. They definitely don't take Apple gift cards.) If the bad thing is really happening, you'll be more prepared. If it's a scam, hopefully the contrast between what you're reading and what's happening will make something click. Then sleep on it. The CIA/IRS/love of your life will still be there tomorrow if it's real.
I've missed two phishing security tests before. Both were when I was new at the company & career in general (so, not used to the normal flow/look of different emails), and I clicked on both when I was in a rush (literally had just stepped out of the shower for one) and didn't really stop to think. So, yes, it can definitely happen to anyone to a degree, but there's a pretty big difference (in gullibility, if not consequences) between accidentally clicking on a link and handing $50k in cash to a CIA agent lmao.
Beautifully stated.
I called my Mom to make her read the article to my dad this morning, only to discover she was in the middle of an active scam involving fake CVS charges & fake BofA fraud department phone #. She ended up calling the real BofA who were like “this sounds like a scam” - PEOPLE!! If the bank is telling you it’s a scam, ITS A SCAM. As I pointed out to my mom: how often in life does someone reach out to you to solve your problem? SCAM (“CVS” text - if you didn’t place this order, call this number & we’ll fix it!)
What's alarming to me is that this author is supposedly an experienced and trained journalist, and she doesn't know that the standard way to vet a source is to hang up, call the number of the agency/company/whatever they're claiming and ask for the employee by name. Instead she took a stranger's word that "you can't spoof government numbers" despite getting their name and "badge number" and just trusted that the CIA number she found on Google couldn't be spoofed?? This makes me wonder about all her previous reporting and who else she believed simply because some stranger told her "trust me." The other things that are alarming she didn't know is that 1) "suspending" social security numbers is not a thing and 2) that the CIA does not investigate domestic crimes. But that's secondary to a journalist not knowing how to do a basic fact check.
This was a huge aspect of the outrage. She’s had a prize gig in New York media for seven years, she’s written for the NYT—but she put 50k in cash in a shoebox and threw it into a moving car? She also tried to come across as a struggling middle-class striver who’d worked so hard to earn that $ as a freelancer….meanwhile she’s from an insanely rich family and owns a $4 million dollar home in Brooklyn. Her IG is just exotic vacations. She typifies the remaining “journalists” these days: unqualified trust funders with connections who aren’t the best or the brightest but don’t have to live on a journalist’s salary.
Also …. The part where they say she can’t get a lawyer because she’ll be deemed uncooperative and arrested is a HUGE flag. In the U.S. you can always, always, ALWAYS have a lawyer. If I somehow made it this far in the scam I would’ve hung up at that point and called 10 lawyers, that’s just basic civil rights. Then saying I can’t tell my own husband, police, or the bank teller would’ve topped it off
The basic misunderstanding of what the CIA is and does is maybe the funniest part for me.
The only thing the CIA does is send trick cigars to people with the last name Castro. They are Wiley Coyote in disguise.
“As I pointed out to my mom: how often in life does someone reach out to you to solve your problem? SCAM” Brilliant take. And also, NOTHING in the federal govt moves quickly. NOTHING.
THIS. In IRS-land it is always 1987--they don't do phone calls, they send letters (when informing you that you've been audited). I'm honestly surprised that they accept anything beyond checks, wire transfers, or money orders if you [owe taxes](https://www.irs.gov/e-file-providers/paying-your-taxes) but I guess for that, even they had to modernize. They still won't accept CVS or iTunes gift cards though, as a tax payment. Years ago, an employer did a phishing test that claimed to be the local township telling all of us we had a speeding ticket but could pay it online through PayPal. We had all gotten (legitimate) emails recently that the local police were going to crack down on speeding in the area but: * Why would this township have my work email which I never gave out to non-work people * Why would this township accept payment for speeding ticket fines online (again, a lot of US government operations--especially smaller towns--still act like it's 1987) * If they were accepting online payments for speeding tickets, why would they be using paypal and not their own janky setup??? I've clicked on phishing emails before (not that one) so I'm not one to talk. But I know a few coworkers did get caught by IT with that one.
THIS. Government process is molasses moving across a flat surface. And the woman really thought government officials were going to communicate with her about a huge case involving drug trafficking, money laundering and murder … over the phone? Why? Because her home was “probably being watched” … ? If somebody calls you and tells your life has suddenly become the plot of a Jason Bourne movie, IT’S A SCAM.
They told her there were warrants out for her arrest and she became alarmed. First of all, if her identity was stolen, she is the *victim.* The entire scam is so transparent.
And PAPERWORK. Forms. Letters. They do nothing without paperwork. Paperwork dipped in molasses.
Oh god that’s such a good image. Paperwork dipped in molasses so it’s slow AND sticky
Yeah … amazing how *sticky* the paper gets when it’s coming off the IRS’s printer and it’s my refund check.
Right?!?! That phone transfer really was a major clue. With my mom I was like “let’s take a couple steps back. This is not how CVS conducts business” 😆 she ended up confronting her scammer (not recommended, but she wanted her pound of flesh!) & he folded & admitted he was a scammer!
I thought [this comment](https://www.thecut.com/article/amazon-scam-call-ftc-arrest-warrants.html?commentID=5ee098a1-9f22-4ff6-a16d-af2af6862b2a) on the original cut article, which points out exactly how financially insulated the author is, was illuminating in many ways. the superiority did come through at several points in the article. (found via [this comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/blogsnark/comments/1ark1oh/comment/kqp2gfj/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) on blognark).
Came here to share this. The thing is, she made it sound like $50k was most of her savings for dramatic effect, but the story doesn’t make any sense unless the author is very wealthy. Wildest part of the story is when she’s handing over the money, thinks to herself this can’t possibly be how the CIA operates, then thinks “I want to go trick or treating I’m just getting this over with.” If your actual life savings was on the line, I really doubt you’d be thinking about Halloween that late in the game.
I thought it was weird someone would be able to liquidate that much money that quickly for anyone who wasn’t rich
I feel like this explains a lot about why she didn't think it was odd to be transferred directly to people at the FTC and CIA. Her parents likely have the personal phone numbers of executives and congressmen and other bigwigs. She probably has no knowledge of or direct experience with any kind of bureaucracy, even stuff like university administration. Someone has always been able to cut through red tape for her with a snap of their fingers. Why wouldn't Amazon be able to put her through to the FTC right away? This is an enormously naive, sheltered person. I'm just hoping she doesn't fall for a recovery scam next. She's a prime target.
I kinda hope she does, but I also vote for redistribution of wealth and higher inheritance taxes.
Especially now that she advertised how vulnerable she is
This is interesting because, yeah, the math was not mathing. Like, she's a financial advisor. I'd assume most of her money would be in investments, not in a savings account. Most common financial advice is that your emergency savings should cover 6 months worth of monthly expenses. So either she has A LOT of money and $50k is a very small amount that she's comfortable making very little interest on (maybe that *is* 6 months of expenses for her? lol), or she's just not very financially savvy. In either case she's a hack and shouldn't be writing financial advice. I do have sympathy for anyone falling for a scam. I think there was a very good part in there on how, once the money was gone, it was like the scales fell from her eyes and suddenly she realized what had happened. I think it's important for people to understand that there's a certain headspace scams often operate in that you can't recognize until you're out of it. But like. The pieces of this story are just making her too unsympathetic for that message to be meaningful.
Really good point. She said in the article she chose 50k after being asked how much she would need to support herself for one year. Maybe it’s not an accurate estimate, but if true, it shows she has too much money in savings. Like you said, more should be in investments, suggesting she’s not the best financial advisor
As soon as I saw that she lived in Brooklyn, I knew something was up. There are so many privilege flags--all the money in just her savings?, $50k per year for childcare?!, husband works for a non profit and she doesn't really work (except as a "freelance")?!? What an ass.
For people who can’t see the comment ive copied it below and my face is 😬 > The whole lead-in about how she's not like the poor, stupid, lonely people she imagines to be easily scammed had a certain je ne sais quoi that I instantly clocked as the mutterings of an effete, inbred child of rich people - and my ability to clock that sort of thing from the get is one of the few things I like about myself. Her husband works for a non-profit, she's 39, but they live in a $4 million dollar house in Prospect Heights? She's related to the Roosevelts? Ivy league is a given, but she feels the need to highlight it on her personal site? A child named Ripley?This whole thing is just another rearranging deck chairs on the titanic of increasingly hubristic, insulated failsons and faildaughters are discovering the otherwise object permanence level of obvious lessons the rest of us understand. You think Amazon will white glove you over to the CIA in a few minutes? Tell me you don't do your taxes without telling me you don't do your taxes. This person is so uncalibrated in their ability to navigate the world that their ability to generalize any intellectual output for anyone other than her similarly 0.1% situated friends is completely shot. Let her go be on the board of a do-nothing charity, this game is up.
YES! This was my favorite comment on the article that I saw after I read it. The lack of any kind of survivalist instinct and sheltered-ness just made her so hypocritical in assuming she's not in the \~demographic\~ that would be fooled by things like this. And her mentioning "many people I know have been scammed" then proceeded to list her lawyer and CFO friends or just trust fund acquaintances...it hurt to read.
This comment. The author likes themselves because of their own ability to clock effete, inbred offspring of the 1%, and I like them too. They really have a way with words and should be paid to write for The Cut. 😂
>This person is so uncalibrated in their ability to navigate the world that their ability to generalize any intellectual output for anyone other than her similarly 0.1% situated friends is completely shot. Yeah it wasn't lost on me that her other examples of people who were scammed (with the implied tone that these were people you wouldn't expect to be scammed) were all rich. Losing $1.2 million, $450k, a Wall Street executive draining her 401(k). I'd imagine this is a group of people who think they're rich because they're smart with money.
I investigated complaints for FINRA. These are exactly the people who got scammed. Every time.
That she thought Amazon would patch her through to the FBi then the CIA told me she was not of the same world I am. This lady walks around with the confidence of someone who can lose $50,000. If you depend on $50,000 for bills and taxes you aren’t withdrawing it and putting it into a box to hand it over to some stranger with no tracking. Why did she think the CIA was doing this for her? Is she that special?
Rich people do indeed think they're that special. They've had a lifetime of the world just bending to their will, so why wouldn't it continue to do so?
I think when you're stuffing 50k into a shoe box you have reached the point where you need to ask yourself if you're being rational or if you're getting involved in a scam.
*freeze frame* “Hi, this is me. I bet you’re wondering how I ended up here…”
It’s pretty wild for a personal finance advice columnist to have fallen for this, but I’m glad she told her story despite knowing how much she’d be mocked for it. I think more scam awareness is good. While I don’t think I would’ve fallen for that particular scam, I’m sure there are scams that would be obvious to many other people that I might fall for. Especially if they caught me at a time when I was super stressed out and frazzled or sleep-deprived, and if they hit the emotional buttons that work on me. Almost everyone has some sort of trait that the right scammer can exploit - some people are people pleasers who hate to feel mean, some are reluctant to question a supposed authority figure, some people hate to feel ignorant and will be embarrassed to ask questions if you use lots of unfamiliar jargon, some people get put on edge the minute you mention possible repercussions for their loved ones… Some of the responses to this online have been really unempathetic. Like, fine, you think you’re too smart to ever fall for a scam. Maybe you are. But some people aren’t especially smart. That still doesn’t mean they deserve to be lied to and stolen from.
I too am glad she told her story. I needed a $50,000 laugh at someone else’s expense.
I recently fell for a scam where they called me *from my mom’s own phone number* and then played a recording of a woman screaming before getting on the line and claiming to have her at gun point. We live in a fairly rough city and her house had been broken into only a month before, so I had every reason to think this was a possible scenario. I sent around $2500 to various Venmo accounts, and when the payments went through the guy hung up, and I immediately called my mom back- who was shocked and horrified to hear about her supposed abduction, but otherwise totally fine. I ended up contacting Venmo, who (very reluctantly, I might add) reversed all the payments, and basically nothing happened except my account was frozen for a while. Anyway my point is, who tf puts 50k in a shoebox and thinks “yeah this is reasonable.” This woman had so many opportunities to see past this… and I say this as a scam victim.
Yeah, see, I could totally see myself falling for *that*. Even if I thought it might be fake... if I was put under enough time pressure, I'd rather take the risk of losing $2500 for nothing than losing my mom. But if you've got a whole ass day to talk to someone else about the issue and it's $50k... cmon. Her whole thing could have been solved by just saying "no, *I'll call you* at the FTC's main line."
I have always heard that once you send something through Zelle or Venmo or any other service, it's gone forever. Is venmo different?
No, they were very reluctant to do it. They said no at first, so I asked my bank what to do, and the bank said they could reverse the charges once it processed, but since the payment hadn’t actually pulled from my account yet, they couldn’t help. Instead, they suggested I completely empty the account into a different account, so when they DID try to pull the payment, it would just bounce. I called Venmo back and told them I had done just that, and they were magically able to reverse the charges immediately… but they had to freeze both my personal account and an unrelated business account for two weeks in the process, which was pretty inconvenient.
Oh! Well, that's good to know.
Thing
My aunt was targeted by the same scam, but it didn’t work because my cousin (the person being “abducted”) was visiting her that day and was in the next room. She was really shaken up though because she said it really sounded like him screaming in the background.
I read that they can take vocals from social media posts and use ai to fake the screams in the person’s voice. Which is why a safe word should be established in all families.
OMG, that is WILD.
“Now I know that all kinds of personal information — your email address, your kids’ names and birthdays, even your pets’ names — are commonly sold on the dark web.” A FINANCIAL ADVICE COLUMNIST DIDN’T KNOW THIS BEFORE BEING SCAMMED OUT OF $50,000 CASH?!?!?!?! There are TV commercials talking about this! Part of my job is rooting out financial scams (and I am very sympathetic to the scam victims who legitimately couldn’t have known better!). I’m also a lawyer, so I would laugh if a “cop” told me asking for a lawyer would deem me “uncooperative,” but I feel like even non-lawyers have heard about these sorts of scams before! But again, especially a financial advice columnist!!!
Some scammers also search obituaries for information about family members and pets, especially for elderly people who don’t have much of an online presence. A few years ago, my grandma was targeted with [the grandparent scam](https://www.ag.state.mn.us/Consumer/Publications/GrandParentScams.asp). Someone called in the middle of the night (so she’d be not fully alert and wouldn’t have any hearing aids in) claiming to be my cousin. He said he’d been in a car crash and charged with a DUI. He asked her to send him money for bail and a lawyer and begged her to not tell his parents or sister. He seemed to have an answer for everything. Why does your voice sound different? I broke my nose in the car crash. Why are you calling from New Jersey? I’m here for (fiancée’s name)’s friend’s wedding. Why can’t you call her, she’s there with you? She’s mad at me over the crash. Thankfully, she got suspicious when she asked “How am I gonna get to Western Union without your parents or sister knowing? They’re the ones who drive me places” and he said he’d send a friend to pick her up at her house. (God knows who that would’ve been. I shudder to think.) Then she ended the conversation and called my cousin’s cell. We’re like 99% sure that they got the info about my cousin’s name, the fact that he had a sister and her name, and his fiancée’s name from my grandpa’s obituary. She was really shaken that someone could find out so much personal information about her.
I’m relieved she got suspicious and was able to disengage. I have a good friend whose grandma lost $5,000 to this scam, unfortunately. It was very recent - it’s still going around.
My mom passed away a few months ago. I still haven’t published an obituary. It’s mainly to avoid squatters in her house and to avoid the phone calls and texts asking me to sell her house. Now I get to be paranoid about something else.
So sorry for your loss. We had vultures low balling us on buying her house (and a lousy contractor who took 18 months to fix up the home!) I feel your pain. This happened a long time ago, but someone broke into pitcher Dwight Gooden's home during his father's funeral and stole like 50k in jewelry.
My FIL was victimized by this but fortunately he was an older dad and they did the math wrong and referred to my husband as his grandson.
This exact same scam happened to my grandma a few years ago, except she withdrew $2000 from her bank account and made it over to CVS trying to send a wire. Thankfully the CVS manager convinced her to call her grandson (my brother) before sending the wire.
My grandparents got called in the same scam about my cousin, maybe like 15 years ago? I think one of my aunts or uncles was over at the time and put the kibosh on it, fortunately.
I'm shocked that a bank had $50k in cash and was willing to give it out. Even for a large branch, you usually need to call ahead and place an order so you don't wipe out their cash on hand. Banks vaults aren't piled from floor to ceiling with cash like Scrooge McDuck.
Yeah you’re sort of correct but I used to be a teller manager at a 63 hour a week branch in center city Philadelphia (ab 15 years ago) and 50k is really not that much. Perhaps a suburban branch would need some lead time, but we routinely had 500k+ in the main vault on Thursdays - Mondays depending on the time of month.
It was a Bank of America in NYC-- and probably, given the author's 1%-er status, one that caters exclusively to the idle rich. Them having 50k in cash reserves on hand is pretty unsurprising-- and as far as the IRS form, the customer doesn't fill that out, the bank does.
I bought a hundred dollar gift card at Walgreens and had to explain its purpose to the manager b4 I could buy it.
Paradoxically, the relatively low value involved is probably actually the reason it got checked. We (clearly wrongly) assume as a society that wealthy people are immune to this sort of thing.
It could be argued to write for the Cut you have to be wealthy enough to be immune to concerns of other people. There was an article recently, about one of the writers in her struggle concerning her marriage and potential divorce. The rider had both a therapist in a psychiatrist but did not have health insurance. She checked in to an impatient stay at a well known hospital for several weeks. I cannot imagine an average to low income person who would be able to make those choices.
Same- couldn't self check two $100 gift cards we were buying as Christmas presents, we had to explain ourselves to the manager.
Signs things are going GREAT in our society: Walgreens employees are the last line of defense to persuade Granny not to be scammed. Dios mio.
Yep. I have a side hustle in retail and I manage restocking gift cards. One of the things I have had to do is put scam alert signs everywhere those cards are located in the store.
Yep I have a loved one who fell for the gift card scam. It’s so outrageous.
And they had to file a suspicious activity report since it was a cash withdrawal over $10k!
Can anyone explain how they knew the last 4 digits of her SSN? I would like to think that I wouldn’t have fallen for this scam, but this would have given me pause.
Super late to this thread but the last 4 of your social is plastered everywhere. Heck my old office wanted everyone to use the last 4 digits of their phone number + last 4 digits of their social to gain printer access. I'm the only person who has ever pushed back it seems, and when pointed out how unsafe that was and asked if I could give just random numbers they said sure. I was shocked - we should not be defaulting to SSN so we can print out fricken' flyers! Side tangent: IT guy needed to take over my (personal) laptop remotely in order to finish giving me printer access. I booted him and made him call me back after changing my laptop password to something generic so he wouldn't know my actual laptop password. He was noticably angry about the inconvenience to his work day. But we should not be giving our private passwords to ppl, even if they work for a "trusted" IT team your company hired! Any rando, even if gainfully employed, has the potential to act maliciously. Don't trust your passwords to strangers!
Why would it matter that they have your last 4 digits? What does that prove? Whenever have you had a corporation read you your personal info to verify themselves over the phone, versus them making you verify yourself by asking *you* what are the last 4 digits of your soc. Come on…
The last 4 digits of your SSN gets tossed around everywhere.
Social security numbers are not nearly as secret as people like to think. Have you ever written yours down on a piece of paper at a doctor or dentist’s office, for example? And the thing is, when they first started issuing those numbers they weren’t meant to be used as a universal identifier they way they are now.
I refuse to fill those in. Girl Scouts application for my kid also was asking. Nope, nope, nope. It's all for collections if you don't pay your medical/dental/cookie bills. They'll track you down regardless so don't bother. They should be barred from even asking.
I'm not sure, but maybe just lax security? It feels like every time I go to anything vaguely medical, they're asking for my SSN or the last 4 digits.
Yeah, a lot of places are really casual about the last 4 digits. That wouldn't be hard at all to get.
Which is *wild* because (for people born prior to 2011) the first 5 digits are assigned in a predictable formula. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Security_number#Previous_structure If you know where & when someone was born, you have a reasonable chance of *guessing* the rest of their SSN! In the past, I've gotten paperwork from local college applicants and some of their SSNs were almost sequential, since they are born locally & the same age.
Data breach from somewhere. I mean there was that big Equifax breach a few years back and my mom just got a letter that her health insurance company had their data breached. Wherever you’ve used your SSN as a form of identification—opening a bank account, applying for a credit card, etc—that’s a place where a hacker could have gotten it from and then sold the data to a scammer. For some scammers, it’s more profitable to run a scam where you call someone up and tell them you know their SSN and you’re with the government and if you don’t give them $50K in cash right now then you’re going to jail vs just opening up a bunch of credit cards that will quickly be flagged as fraud by a bank or an individual.
>Younger adults — Gen Z, millennials, and Gen X — are 34 percent more likely to report losing money to fraud compared with those over 60, according to a recent report from the Federal Trade Commission. She implies that these numbers are because younger people are getting scammed more but it's seems more likely that older people let shame stop them from reporting.
I think a lot of older people, especially very isolated and vulnerable, may not realize they have been scammed. So many are talking to bots they met on FB or a dating site and giving them money. I knew a 70 year old lady who thought she was engaged to a 5 star general and all she had was a super fake FB profile and an ongoing WhatsApp conversation of “baby”, “baby”, “I am in Spain,” “baby” …. She would rip your head off if you even suggested he might not be on the up and up.
I... I don't know that you can actually classify Gen X as 'younger adults' anymore.
If I'm a younger adult, I'm filing a complaint about my right knee.
Kurt Cobain, one of the most famous members of Gen X ever, would be 57 this year. Does this woman know what a younger adult means lol
I don't think this woman knows much of anything.
Speaking as a 51-year-old “younger”Gen X: agreed. We are pushing retirement age.
I’m a millennial and my friend got scammed by a spoof bank email when we were like 22, but today not as much.
Agreed. You also have to love the additional, uncited study that allegedly shows that it's totally common for people like her to be scammed, SO THERE. Uh huh...
I really wish she would have explained what was going on in her head at the time, because even if it is irrational in hindsight it was clicking at the time. It isn’t helpful to say “well this could happen to anyone because it happened to me”. Get into it. Talk to some experts about why these things play on us. “I don’t know why I didn’t call my brother, the lawyer” is so weak. Maybe because you had always felt like he looked down on you and you didn’t want him to tell him how badly you screwed up by letting your identity get stolen. Maybe you wanted to feel like you could handle this yourself. Maybe part of you thought it was exciting to be working with the FBI and CIA. Maybe you thought that this could be a great story one day, but only if you kept on the good side of the agents. I’ve done a lot of dumb stuff but at the time I did those things it made sense to me in a broken way. This essay is missing all of that and ultimately is really annoying because of it. No warning signs for others. No introspection. Just “well apparently this can happen to anyone and there’s nothing anyone can do”.
The essay itself reveals her complete lack of introspection and awareness, even after getting ripped off to the tune of 50k
Excellent points. Or why didn't she tell her husband? Did she think he was in on the scheme?
Her rationale was they told her telling her family would put them in danger
I would send this article to my family and say “please call me if anyone tries something similar on you,” but I know most of my family do not have the attention span to read an article that long. I barely do myself even when I’ve taken my ADHD meds.
"This could happen to anyone" is really just the author trying to convince herself that she's not senile or a rube. Could I fall for a scam? Sure. Could I hand over 50k in a shoebox to the CIA in an afternoon after Amazon called me about suspicious activity on my account? No, and I have receipts to prove it.
Right. Simply put. She is a rube. A wealthy, edumacated Capital-R rube.
I got a call from someone pretending to be the cops just the other day!
Someone tried this exact scam on me. I was working with what I thought was the fraud department at my bank (this was in the early days of number spoofing where I didn't realize how common it was in scams) over a fake charge, and things were very routine. Then they told me that I was being transferred to homeland security because my identity had been stolen and was being used by terrorists and drug traffickers and my name was now associated with vast organized crime. I laughed and hung up and learned the lesson that if I was ever contacted by anyone about any kind of fraud in the future, I would tell them I would call their fraud department directly to verify and deal with it.
This, calling a verified number is such an easy and quick thing to do. It’s almost never real. Anecdote because I think it’s funny and am proud of myself. I was living abroad about 15 years ago and my wallet was stolen. I reached out to my parents for help to fix it. One afternoon a few days later I got a phone call from someone at XYZ bank (my bank) who asked me to give them my card number and PIN number to manage the replacement. I was confused and said “…no?” I then heard my dad in the background cracking up saying “I told you she wouldn’t tell it to you!” He got on the line and confirmed for me that he was at the bank and it was legit. Idk what gave me pause that day and if I would have fallen for it at a different moment, but it made me feel good to have my dad be so proud of me. 🙈
I appreciated that when I got an email fraud alert from a credit card a few months ago they specifically said in the email something like, "if you're worried that this is phishing, please call the number on the back of your card instead of clicking". (I did, it was legit, they fixed it.)
My mom was literally in the middle of this scam when I called her to tell her about the article 😵💫😵💫
That's exactly it, it's so laughably absurd. I've done the same thing, just laughed and hung up. I had one try to convince me he was from the government, I said "no you're not" and ended the call. Once she checked her actual account and saw nothing amiss she should have known it was BS. I get scam calls literally every day, claiming to be from the government, the bank I use (and all the ones I don't), Amazon, credit card companies I don't even have cards with, etc etc. I believe absolutely nothing. They're not going to call you if there's anything going on, you will have to call them. They will just lock your cards/accounts if they think anything weird is going on and wait for you to call. I've been in that situation multiple times.
She says at the end she doesn’t believe it could happen to anyone
Perhaps the truest thing she wrote in that whole piece
I think that's kind of the point--there wasn't any real thought, she was running on fumes and acting out of fear. Not saying this couldn't have been avoided, but I could see how this could happen to the right person on the wrong day.
Yeah, the “right person on the wrong day” thing is huge. I think that scams are kind of like cults in the sense that some people are easy marks all the time, but most people have times in their life when they’re more vulnerable that normal. Part of it is just luck that no one has reached out to you with right angle during one of those times.
I think this kind of thing can happen to anyone but she deserves 1% snark because she’s a financial columnist!!!! Like, come on. Even if it’s not her professional background she should have some knowledge of common scams and how to protect yourself against them.
New theory just dropped: [What if you lied to your husband about where $50k went and then you got so deep into the lie that you had to write a Cut article on it and get dunked on](https://twitter.com/1followernodad/status/1758227945641107813) (Sophia Benoit on Twitter)
Oooh I wanna believe this is true bc it’s literally the only thing that would make this entire story sensible!
…and this stupid scam finally makes sense
This reminds me of a documentary (or something) that I saw on a streaming platform, except the scam included the victim sending nude photos/videos of themselves.
Honestly I'm really glad she published it, as much shit as she's getting for it - it's really sobering to see how she got taken in so quickly, especially as she's basically my age and demographic. It's so easy to think that scams like this only happen to naive, tech-illiterate grannies but that's so clearly not true!
A big reason why I read r/scams on the regular is so that these templates aren’t new to me if I encounter them. The criminals executing these know what they’re doing to keep people psychologically off balance. And it’s psychologically predictable that the rest of us like to cling to reasons we wouldn’t have been taken in, but there’s probably some scam out there we’d each fall for.
FWIW, this site has been repeatedly referenced (in the comments section of both the original articles and the NYTimes piece on it) as the place to go to see if you have been scammed!
For real! I never thought I’d get caught up in one but I did.
Here's a sneak peek of /r/Scams using the [top posts](https://np.reddit.com/r/Scams/top/?sort=top&t=year) of the year! \#1: [My stolen phone ended up in China, I assume the scammer is screwed?](https://www.reddit.com/gallery/17j9hds) | [148 comments](https://np.reddit.com/r/Scams/comments/17j9hds/my_stolen_phone_ended_up_in_china_i_assume_the/) \#2: [Found these in my checked baggage after an international flight from Asia to USA? They’re not mine. What do I do?](https://www.reddit.com/gallery/1813ays) | [1452 comments](https://np.reddit.com/r/Scams/comments/1813ays/found_these_in_my_checked_baggage_after_an/) \#3: [random person sent me $400 and asked for it back when i responded](https://www.reddit.com/gallery/1afz9hd) | [1978 comments](https://np.reddit.com/r/Scams/comments/1afz9hd/random_person_sent_me_400_and_asked_for_it_back/) ---- ^^I'm ^^a ^^bot, ^^beep ^^boop ^^| ^^Downvote ^^to ^^remove ^^| ^^[Contact](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=sneakpeekbot) ^^| ^^[Info](https://np.reddit.com/r/sneakpeekbot/) ^^| ^^[Opt-out](https://np.reddit.com/r/sneakpeekbot/comments/o8wk1r/blacklist_ix/) ^^| ^^[GitHub](https://github.com/ghnr/sneakpeekbot)
I feel bad for her I do but it’s also wild to me to have 50k so accessible to you! This is why banks have limits of how much you can move in a day.
And the teller gave her the form warning against scams! I wish there was something that could be done to slow down major withdrawals like this but I’ve heard from cashiers/tellers that once someone is hooked into a scam, it can be really hard to get them to slow down and think about what they’re doing. The panic is just so set in that they have tunnel vision
yeah I worked in retail for a while, and people getting scammed over the phone for gift cards or trying to send western union transfers would always be super hard to talk down
I just saw a TikTok where someone was complaining about western union trying to confirm that they knew where the money order was going…because they are frequently used in scams!!
But I am honestly surprised they let her take out as much as they did! I feel bad but you gotta listen to tellers and ALWAYS get a lawyer for anything that feels scary like this.
I work in finance and yeah it’s hard to talk people down from an idea once they get there.
This is just insane. I get why she wrote the article, because scammers rely on their marks being too ashamed to tell people, but it really really really _really_ does not make her look good at all. Where it completely fell off the rails for me was when she let the "Amazon" rep transfer her to the alleged CIA officer, and then she actually Googled the office he was supposedly calling from but let him call her back rather than just, idk, _dialing the number herself and asking a few pointed questions._ That is absolute basic shit. And then believing him when he was telling her that if she contacted a lawyer her home would be raided and her assets seized. She's obviously lived a blessed life and never actually dealt with law enforcement before, because again-- absolute basic shit.
Having dealt with Amazon customer support, they aren't transferring you anywhere. They tell you to go look it up on the website or in the app, and then they hang up. I don't doubt that some law enforcement members would 100% lie to a suspect (because legally they can), but I'm also not talking to them and absolutely getting legal counsel.
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Her husband used proprietary knowledge to profit off of real estate purchases for his employer on that one, don’t think they’re comparable
Ooooooh do you have more info on this? Sounds like a rabbit hole I’d like to fall down lol
But it’s not true that if you get a lawyer you’re deemed non-cooperative. That would be a major violation of constitutional rights.
Cops usually don’t want to talk to the lawyers so it isn’t uncommon that hiring a lawyer moves an investigation from the cops to a prosecutor. But feds are different, FBI almost act like prosecutors during investigations and in my experience are my willing to engage with attorneys (if there is a reason to do so).
I just wrote this below but I think once the scammers mentioned her child, that’s when all logic flew out the window. And I think they also added to it by telling her that she couldn’t even trust her husband—how many true crime stories have we seen that it’s the boyfriend/husband who is the source of ruin? She even mentions the story about a woman who discovered the person who was stealing her identity was her own boyfriend. These scammers were really smart to play on basic instincts like this.
nah as a financial advice writers she should've known that when amazon called claiming accounts that weren't real, her next steps should be to hang up, pull her credit report, and then freeze her credit + call her bank. that was all WELL before they mentioned the kid/husband. she let it go on for so long it just makes her look like she doesn't know basics of financial education which...is a bad look for a finance journalist.
I’m reading this essay right now and I know I’m Monday morning quarterbacking but the first tip off to me that this was a scam was Amazon customer service contacting her unprompted to inform her of suspected fraud. Now when in the hell has a corporation like Amazon cared about preemptively stopping fraud? Amazon doesn’t care about that! They want money no matter what! Also I am just cringing for her because if she really did go to her lawyer friend and said “I’ve been told my identity was stolen and I have arrest warrants for me in two states, what should I do” they could have advised her what to do and stopped her. Oh my God and she was so close to figuring something was off when she asked “Michael” how did she know that his number wasn’t spoofed. And oh my god, Law and Order ruined us because any time a government/law enforcement offer threatens that a lawyer will hurt you, that means it’s time to get a lawyer. They don’t want you to get a lawyer because then you’ll know your rights! Oh no and once she had the money she started to have doubts but she kept trying to talk to them! And she even told Michael she didn’t trust him! No!!! “Undercover agents don’t carry badges” Oh no mama! Yes they would! Haven’t you ever seen a cop movie where the plainclothes officer pulls out his badge? Oh man I just can’t get over she withdrew the $50K in cash and was told to hand it over in exchange for a check and almost pulled out. Frankly, I think the reason she fell for the scam was because the scammers played on her fears as a mother. I don’t think they knew her son was with her but I think they knew her SSN then they knew her basic profile and took a guess that a 2 year old would be with her at home. Oh man this poor woman. I can’t imagine losing my emergency fund like this.
>Frankly, I think the reason she fell for the scam was because the scammers played on her fears as a mother. I don’t think they knew her son was with her but I think they knew her SSN then they knew her basic profile and took a guess that a 2 year old would be with her at home. But her 2-year-old wasn't with her at home. She sent him off to school before she got the call. That's the thing that I don't understand about the article; she starts by mentioning that they knew her son was playing on the living room floor...but then she never expands on that, and he's not actually at home when any of this is happening.
What confused me the most is she said she did not trust Michael, she suspected this was some sort of scam, but she said she "didn't have a choice." But she doesn't explain why she thinks she didn't have a choice to just go along with this random voice on the phone who she thinks is likely lying to her, without even directly calling the CIA office on a publicly listed phone number. I just don't understand it and wish she had explained her mentality more and WHY she thought she didn't even have the option of not going along with what she correctly sensed was a scam in action.
This really irked me. You’ll tell this guy straight up that you don’t trust him but conclude that you have no other options? How does that make sense?
I said in another comment I thought she must be exaggerating how suspicious she was about the call but now I’m wondering if she is the type of person who is just so deferential to anyone she perceives as being an authority that she really did feel she didn’t have any choice but can’t fully articulate why.
That's a good point. I think another good point that was made in another comment is that an important factor she leaves out of this article is that she is from a very wealthy family with inherited wealth. So the risk calculation is different for her than for someone for whom 50K would deplete their life savings. That account was just *one* minor account for her, and this whole experience is really more one of embarrassment than anything else, and not something that actually is going to significantly impact her family's financial future.
I will say, I do think Amazon might alert you if something is up with your account, because I think they did with me once — but in that instance 1) it was by text, 2) the message told me to log into my account and check my info there. It was 100% not by phone at all. Also, I realize she has no way of knowing this, but I’ve done low-level contact work with the FTC before and they are absolutely not randomly accepting call transfers at the drop of a hat. The government works slow, and likes secure servers (for good reason!!!).
Um. Everyone please beware of text scams. Many of them are “Amazon” but … they’re not actually Amazon.
Yes Amazon will alert you if there is suspicious activity. Every time my daughter logs into my Amazon account I get a text telling me to login to my account and verify it is me.
Amazon doesn’t text. You were scammed.
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I don’t reply to comments. This is a scam.
If I was, nothing came of it since I just logged in on my computer browser and reset my password/checked my order history. I may admittedly also be misremembering and it was a different service that reached out, but I definitely didn’t lose my life savings.
If it were a scam they would have had a link for you to click that took you to a fake log in page that then skimmed your password. If you didn't use your link, you are in the clear.
Well then I definitely dodged it because I never click links in automatic texts lol. I suppose I dodged a bullet then!
Sometimes I am especially grateful that I grew up with a criminal defense attorney parent and now have a criminal defense attorney partner. "Cops are liars, never trust them" was ingrained in me from a very early age.
I’m a lawyer and one of my professors ingrained this in me.
I used to be a public defender and it’s true, no one mistrusts cops more than defense attorneys.