The Citizen Scam Series: Article 1

Editor’s Note: There’s a new scam every day. The scam of the week is the text everyone is getting that says you owe some tolls. Do not click. But even the smartest people can get sucked into one of these scams.

My brilliant father, who had a PhD in Biochemistry fell prey to one of those scams where a screen on his laptop told him he needed to call tech support. When he called the number, it was a scammer, who got some money from him for purported tech support. By the time he realized he’d been had, the scammer not only had his money, but had access to his computer via remote login. It was time to call in the Geeksquad. He had to debug AND cancel a credit card. Luckily those scammers didn’t get access to his bank account, but they could have.

As a daughter, I know that if my dad could’ve fallen prey to a scam, anyone could. And those in the older population are particularly vulnerable, because they may not be as tech savvy. So I’ve interviewed some local folks who got scammed, local law enforcement who combat scammers and also several bank and financial services professionals who also fight scammers. The Citizen Scam Series is going to run for the next couple of weeks. If you have your own scam story that you’d like to be a part of this series, please send me a message via the contact form on this website.

Preventing more of our Citizens from getting scammed is a priority of mine, especially since local law enforcement says financial fraud is the most common way, and the most financially devastating, that people are having crime committed against them in Fayette County and the surrounding areas.

Yours, Ellie White-Stevens, Editor-in-Chief, The Citizen

Our first story in the scam series is a rarity, Scarlet* (name changed), a woman from Fayette County, managed to work well enough with law enforcement and the banks in order to recover all of the money scammed out of her mom, who we’ll call Julie.

The scam itself is not so rare. Someone claiming to be Julie’s bank called her. They had enough of her personal information to know which bank she was with. Scarlet thinks it’s possible that Julie unwittingly gave them that info a week prior when someone claiming to be Amazon called her and managed to get her social security number. Because of that incident,  Julie, an 82-year-old woman dealing with a husband with Alzheimer’s, didn’t sleep well.

According to Scarlet, “The scammers call and they say that they are with the bank and there is an inside job at the bank. She cannot let the bank know at all, and she needs to withdraw her money and send it to them. That is how it started. They even gave her a phone number.”

Sleep deprived, Julie was convinced by the scammers on the phone to secretly withdraw all her money and send it to new addresses for safekeeping. The people on the phone had her scared. They sounded legit. Julie believed them. The scammers were savvy enough to tell Julie that she should go to multiple branches to take out the some $270K she had in the bank. They told her to tell the teller that the money in cashier’s checks was for home renovations.

Julie took $50,000 from one branch in Clayton County, $147,000 from another in Fayetteville, $73,000 from the first branch on a separate occasion. The scammers had her mail it to three separate addresses. This is where the Peachtree City Police told me there was a benefit—because often money gets converted to bitcoin or some other method and is out of the country and lost forever. But these checks were all sent to domestic addresses.

And that was the saving grace. Because one of the addresses in Waco, Texas, had been flagged by a detective out of North Carolina as being that of a scammer. That detective had told UPS. And it was a UPS delivery worker, who noted the name and address on the envelope package that Julie sent to Waco. And they caught it, and asked their supervisor, “Didn’t that detective say we should call if we get another package to this person?”

Scarlet called that UPS worker “beautiful and smart.”

The detective in North Carolina called Scarlet’s family. As Scarlet and her brother were both on the account in addition to her mom, the detective first tried Scarlet. Scarlet was at work in Peachtree City and didn’t pick up. Her brother’s wife in California answered the phone and got the info from the detective.

The brother called his mom to ask her what happened. Julie was either confused, embarrassed or she thought she still shouldn’t tell people about the bank’s purported inside job. So she told him maybe she sent a check for $500 to Waco.

Scarlet’s brother called her and said, “Mom sent some money to someone in Waco, Texas. She says it’s $500.”

Scarlet was concerned. She left work right away. She checked in at the bank and discovered all the money missing and the check for $50,000, not $500. “I saw all those zeroes and started screaming,” said Scarlet.

Scarlet took the next day off work so that she could try to track all this down.

Scarlet couldn’t believe this had happened. She had talked her mom through scam scenarios. She had put herself on her mom’s account. She hoped that the bank would have questioned her mom stronger, but according to her the bank just said that her mom seemed to be “of sound mind.” According to Scarlet they only questioned the withdrawal of the $147,000. They didn’t take much responsibility, but they did tell her what bank one of the checks had been cashed at.

The money was still there, as cashier’s checks that large get put on hold when they are cashed or deposited. Scarlet couldn’t believe that her bank wouldn’t just retrieve it for her, but she said they were little help. “I’m looking right at them, sitting at the little cubicle and they’re going, ‘Yeah, that money is probably gone. We’ll have the fraud manager call you.’”

Scarlet even went to a local branch of the bank who was holding her mom’s money in Texas. They told her to call an 800 number, fill out a form and that she’d have to wait three weeks.

Scarlet was desperate. Since her mom was a Clayton County Resident, “I immediately drive to Riverdale, I drive to the police station. Well, there’s so much scamming, they did not care. They were like, here’s the police report. I spent an hour sitting there writing down all of the numbers, all of the details.”

They basically told her, “I’m sorry, lady, your money is gone.”

“What do I do next? I drive over to the UPS center, I speak to the UPS center and I just start digging. The manager comes right out, he’s mortified. The cop [from North Carolina] had told UPS to send back the $50,000.”

Scarlet started googling scams, and she found an article written in a local paper that referenced a GBI agent and email address. She she reached out to the GBI. Even though they don’t normally help people directly, an agent called her. Once he heard that the money was on hold at a bank in Texas, and the large amount, he got involved immediately and put a freeze on it. The GBI got it returned to her. That was the big check of $147,000.

The third check for $73,000, her mom’s bank was able to flag and cancel, so when it got deposited at a different bank in the Northeast, it essentially bounced, even though it was a cashier’s check.

That’s how Scarlet got her mom’s money back.

Since then, Scarlet has been even more diligent to watch her mom and her mom’s money. She had her mom change her phone number. Scarlet had the bank set up a text alert anytime more than $100 is withdrawn from her mom’s accounts.

Scarlet is also on the edge of paranoid when it comes who to trust. She didn’t want me to share the names of the banks involved or her family’s names, because it’s all so fresh and scary to her, even though it happened over a year ago.

She says she’s only trusting a “cop car in the driveway.” Otherwise, if she gets a call from someone saying they are in law enforcement, she calls them back, making sure she’s verified their i.d. and their phone number. Even after all that, Scarlet came home to her mom recently filling out a scam form she’d received by mail. Scarlet says her next plan is to change her mom’s address.

Scarlet also doesn’t let her mom send out checks to anyone anymore. “We give cash to the church,” she said.

Scarlet says that the banks and police know that cashier’s checks are a red flag for scams. And Detective Michelle Taylor with the Criminal Investigations Division of the  Peachtree City Police Department concurred with this. She investigates financial crimes, and sees problems like what Scarlet faced regularly. She said it was “rare” that Scarlet would be able to get the money back. She also says that fraud provides the highest monetary loss to victims locally.

Det. Taylor also says that banks are mandated reporters of financial fraud. She says they should be asking their customers, “Hey, why are we withdrawing money today in such a big amount?”

This scam that Scarlet’s mom faced could have cost $270,000 and much of Julie’s life savings. Scarlet’s diligence and follow up, along with the work of the GBI, UPS, and that detective in North Carolina got her money back.

It did have a cost, though. It’s given Scarlet a bit of a case of PTSD around financial fraud. It also cost her the equivalent in time of a week of work as she did follow ups, visits to police agencies and more time than it should have straightening out her mom’s banks accounts. Because they were frozen, the family even had to deal with bounced checks for household bills.

Since then, Scarlet has been contacted by the FBI, as they are investigating this crime since it crosses state lines. There’s an open case in California against Julie’s scammers.

What should you do if you think you’re being scammed? Detective Taylor suggests that you call 911. You’ll be directed to the correct law enforcement agency for your address that way, and you can ask them to investigate for you. They may even be able to tell you if the potential scam you were ABOUT to send money to is legit or not. They can also request help from the GBI, if your money has been cashed or deposited at a bank and is on hold.