-Here is what we're going to do today.
I'm going to talk about some of the trends.
"Why are we talking about impostors so much?"
you might ask, and Bob alluded to this, so did Mike,
but I'm going to give you a couple more just data points
about how this is really the type of scam
that's most likely to target us these days,
and then we're going to go a little bit deeper on --
Bob already talked about the IRS.
You'll hear a lot about the IRS today.
You're going to hear from a guy who actually worked
in one of these scam rooms in a minute,
though and, likewise, with tech support,
I know Courtney is going to talk about --
I mean, I know there is some overlap to our presentations,
but we believe that repetition is the mother of learning so --
And then just sort of tips on how to avoid this.
Well, here is how we define an impostor:
a scammer who is pretending to be someone
they are not in order to trick you out of your money,
and, you know, you could argue that that's been true forever
with swindlers and con men that's what they do,
they pretend to be somebody they're not,
but there are these three trends
that Mike already alluded to them,
but I'm going to go over them briefly again:
technology, the globalization of the economy
and this fear and anxiety
because we really believe these are the drivers,
and all of this is designed --
As Mike said, you folks are not going to fall
for the IRS scam, right?
I mean, you've heard about it and so forth
or the tech support or any of the things we're talking about,
but not everybody who could fall for this is in the room today,
so we really do hope at the end of the day
that you'll take this out and warn others.
What do we mean by technology driving things?
To me, I've been studying fraud for 30 years,
and the technology -- I mean, one con artist said,
"If you're not using the Internet to commit your crimes,
you should be guilty of malpractice"
because it is just so easy
to pretend to be somebody you're not,
whether it's a romance scam or something else,
and, you know, you can -- The number of robo --
How many people have gotten a robo-dial call in the last week?
Everyone, right? Everyone.
It is so easy to just press a button, as Mike said,
and, you know, 500,000 calls come in, and so it behooves --
You know, it's up to us to come up
with sort of defenses to these things.
The other thing is just the globalization of the economy.
You could be calling from Malaysia.
You could be calling from India.
It doesn't really matter.
You can e-mail from all over the world.
It is really, truly a global economy,
and this makes it really hard for law enforcement to stop it
and puts even more pressure on those of us
in the prevention world to get to people ahead of time,
and the last piece is fear and anxiety.
You know, we live in the age of anxiety.
There's a lot to be anxious about, and as Mike alluded to,
there is a lot of good research now
that shows that when we're anxious,
we just don't make good financial decisions
or any decisions, really, and the con artist knows that.
They will ratchet up that anxiety,
and you're going to see how they do it in a minute.
The data doesn't lie.
These are statistics from Consumer Sentinel.
This is Chuck's organization that shows
just this meteoric rise of impostor fraud
reported to the Federal Trade Commission
over the last 5 years, a huge increase.
In Washington State, this is the data
from reports they got from Washington State.
It is by far the number-one thing followed by
debt collection, telephone, banks and lenders.
We just did a survey,
and I'm going to report we're releasing that today
as part of the launch of this campaign,
called "Are You Real? Unmasking the Impostors."
This was done by Karla Pak, who is sitting right here.
Karla Pak is our research guru,
and so I hope I don't get any of this wrong, Karla.
We surveyed 800 people really recently, like,
March 28th to April 21st,
and one of the things we asked them was,
"What kind of calls do you get?"
and a huge percentage of the stuff
that we're talking about today, that's not an accident.
The number-one thing people reported
was that they have gotten the tech support scam,
which you'll be hearing about quite a bit today.
Whether it's a pop-up that says you've got a virus,
whether it's somebody calling you saying
they're from Microsoft, 56% of the people we surveyed
said they've gotten this in the last 12 months,
and that was by far the number-one thing
they were targeted with followed by phishing scams,
there's something wrong with your bank account from a bank,
you know, fill in this personal information,
and that's what they're in it for
is your personal identifying information.
33%, one out of three people,
lottery scams, IRS and so forth,
so you can start to see how this breaks down.
We also gave people a quiz, "What is your impostor IQ?"
and let's just go through this.
You don't have to raise your hand or just --
But see if you could answer these questions yourself.
Question number one, commercial telemarketing robo-dials,
which everyone gets, from companies you don't have
a previous business relationship with are illegal.
How many people think that's true?
How many people think it's false?
How many people don't know? A lot of people don't know.
It is actually true, and 73% of the people we surveyed
were either not sure or did not know.
Here is another one.
Caller ID is a reliable way to know
where a telemarketing call is coming from.
True?
False, very good, false.
38% didn't know or got that wrong, so we think,
"Oh. Well, if I've got a caller ID thing,
it says it's calling from 206."
We all know, but not everybody in the state knows,
that that's spoofing.
Very few telemarketers use their real phone number now
because you can just buy a number
and make it look like you're calling from the 206, right,
but not everybody knows that.
We know it, but not everybody knows it.
This is an example of a fact that would be great
to share with your neighbors who may not know this.
Technology companies don't notify customers
when a virus is spotted on their computer.
True?
False?
That's true. They don't.
44% didn't know that or got it wrong,
and, finally, the IRS is allowed by law
to call you about back taxes you owe
without sending written notice first.
False, very good, and a lot of people did --
Only 23% got that wrong,
so we'll talk more about that IRS thing in a minute.
So of these 10 questions, 77% of the respondents
got 60% or less which is kind of a D.
There's -- It's an F.
It's an F.
It's not good. Yes?
-Could you e-mail me your presentation?
It's going really fast.
-Is it going too fast for you? -Yes.
-We could probably post it online.
-Okay. -Yeah.
We don't want to --
I'm not trying to hide anything from you.
-No, no, no, no. I just want to go back to it.
-Okay, but you reminded me to slow down.
I appreciate that.
No, really.
I tend together too revved up about this thing,
and so part of the other survey --
So we sort of have this general conclusion
that not everybody knows
the tactics impostors use to defend themselves.
Yet when we ask them, "How confident are you
that you could spot one of these scams?"
87% said that they're pretty confident,
and another 85% said that they're pretty sure
they won't fall for a fraudulent pitch.
So you have this confluence of really showing
that they don't really know what the tactics are exactly to spot
but a lot of confidence that they won't be taken,
and this is something you will encounter as our fraud fighters
now going out into the world.
Nobody thinks they're going to fall for any of this.
It's known as the illusion of invulnerability.
In the health psychology literature,
this has been true for years.
People say, "You know what?
People get cancer, but I won't," right?
You don't want to think about it, whether.
You're in denial.
Well, if you never think you're going to get cancer,
you'll never do anything to prevent it,
and the same is true with this.
If you never think you're going to be taken,
you'll never take steps to avoid it other than this general idea
that I'm just not going to fall for it
because I'm too smart, and my pet peeve --
I won't go into too much detail about this,
but you know this phrase,
"If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is?"
I hate that phrase. Why?
Because it assumes --
It's a perfectly logical thing to say and to think,
but that assumes that you're thinking logically
and rationally at the moment you make that decision,
and the con man's great gift
is to put you into an emotional state
so you don't think logically.
So if you're only relying on your rational mind
and not managing your emotions,
managing whether you're vulnerable or not,
it's like locking a safe,
you know, you're locking your money in a safe
that the con man has the key to really.
It's really more and more
about managing people's emotions in their vulnerable state,
not about intelligence or brain power.
So let me introduce you to two characters
that we recently interviewed.
One of them, Jayesh, the guy on the left, is from India,
and the other guy, Dan, is from South Florida,
and both of them worked in fraudulent boiler rooms
that did various bad things to people in the United States,
and the one thing I want to say about these two
by way of introduction,
we've interviewed a lot of con men.
Usually -- Bruce and I, for years,
have gone into prisons
and interviewed guys in orange jumpsuits.
These are really bad guys, drug dealers, you know,
and they tell us how they did it, and that's the thing.
There is this growth in people
like these two guys who aren't really --
These two guys were never charged with any crime,
and they were never convicted of any crime,
yet they did the work.
They did these calls,
and increasingly you're seeing boiler rooms in South Florida.
They have hundreds and hundreds of these people
who are just young people looking for a job,
and they get caught up in these rooms,
and what I'm going to take you through here in the time
that I have is to go a little deeper
into both the IRS scam and the tech support scam,
and I know both Chuck and Courtney
are going to touch on this.
Courtney, in particular,
is sort of the tech support expert from Microsoft,
and she's really, really an expert on it.
We're just going to take you through
what these two guys talked to us about for a minute,
so you can get a real feel for how they do it
and especially how they focus on getting you
into a heightened emotional state
which, in both cases,
tends to be fear, fear and anxiety,
fear that something is terribly wrong.
So let's see. Let's see.
I'm going to play this tape,
and you've probably all heard it before,
but we're going to play it again.
This is a call that came in recently.
How many people have gotten that call?
Half, at least, of the audience, so that's out there,
and, you know, we've heard these reports from TCA
and other places that they're bombarding Americans,
but who is the person on the other end of the phone?
Who is that person,
or who is the person you end up talking to?
And this is where we want to introduce you
to one person who we interviewed who actually worked in one
of these boiler rooms in India, and this is the first --
You're the first people to see this
since we filmed this guy in India.
-Meet Internal Revenue Service officer Adam Smith,
better known to his family and friends as Jayesh Dubey,
a 19-year-old in Mumbai, India.
Jayesh and his friend Pawan Poojary
were looking for work
when they heard about an opportunity
in one of Mumbai's many telephone call centers.
He was impressed by the office and the size of the operation.
He was especially impressed by the salary.
Jayesh started off just answering calls from America,
getting basic information and handing the victim off
to an experienced closer.
As he gained skill on the phone,
he handled the whole call himself,
getting the victim to hand over the money
to pay their fictitious tax bill.
The phone room reached out all over the United States
every day.
As he talked to more and more Americans, he and Pawan
began to feel bad for the people they were stealing from.
They decided to quit,
and they were fortunate not to be at the office
when 200 Indian police officers descended on the operation.
Police blocked the exits, detained more than 700 people
working that day and seized everything inside.
Authorities determined the office
was just a branch of a larger operation
that made over 1.8 million calls to America
and stole hundreds of millions of dollars.
Today, Jayesh is speaking out about his experience
and the tactics he used in the boiler rooms of India
to defraud Americans,
and he has one message above all.
-So there you have it. That was Bruce Carlson.
Bruce, nice job on that video.
Yeah. Good job.
[ Applause ]
Thank you.
What we want to do now, now that you've met him,
is go -- Oh, there's Bruce. He's in the back, very shy.
He's very shy and withdrawn.
We want to take you through just for a couple minutes --
go a little deeper.
What happens if you call back the number?
How many of you who got that call called the number back
to find out what it was?
Not very many, hardly any.
Well, you heard him say that they were doing
50,000 calls a day.
10,000 people called back.
I mean, if you get one of these calls,
you're not sure what it is.
I mean, the IRS is scary, right, and so what do they really say?
And we are going to --
We had, you know, one of our super-duper fraud fighters,
I won't say where they were or who they are,
talk through, call back
and see what they really say, so let's listen,
and then we'll hear Jayesh comment about it.
That's pretty scary, right?
One of the things that Jayesh told me when we interviewed him
was this works
especially well for people who live by themselves,
who don't have another adult living with them who can say,
"What? Come on. What do you mean?"
Section 7201, Chuck, correct me if I'm wrong,
is an actual part of the tax code,
so they're doing their research about this, and it's --
You know, the best lie is based on some degree of truth,
and so -- But that gets very scary
very quickly for people who live by themselves.
Let's hear what Jayesh has to say about it.
And could you imagine just hundreds and hundreds --
I mean, when they busted this room,
they detained 700 people
that were in this building in downtown Mumbai.
700 people were doing this,
and I don't know where this call came from.
It might have been Mumbai. It might have been Malaysia.
It might have been, who knows, South Africa,
but all of the tactics we've identified
before about source credibility,
pretending to be -- Oh, look at this.
He's talking about being the --
working with the attorney general.
I wonder if Bob knows this. Let's...
So as you resist --
This is one of the dangers of even calling.
As you resist more and more,
they ratchet up the threats, and this is --
Let's hear from Jayesh about this.
Yeah, so we know that it's not true,
but hearing it from the guy in the room
saying, "No. We weren't recording it,
and no, we don't know any attorney generals."
I mean, we now know an attorney general,
but so, Shannon, I hope you're listening to that one.
Then as you resist more and say,
"How do I know this is even true?"
they ratchet up the pressure even more to the point of,
in this particular call,
they had the audacity to tell the victim,
"You don't believe me, so what I want you to do
is go down to the police station.
I'm going to fax your documents to the police station,
and they will arrest you,
and then that will prove that I'm real," so let's listen.
Confident. That's a confident --
I guess that's why they call them con men maybe,
but you could imagine somebody, an older person living alone,
having this conversation, trying to resist,
and they just ratchet up the threats.
So what does Jayesh say?
Is any of that real?
So, again, for this audience here,
who never would fall for this, you say, "I know. I know.
I know," but part of the reason we make these videos
and try and distribute them online, in person,
is for that person who may be alone getting this call
and doesn't believe that it isn't true.
The conclusion to this -- Well, one conclusion is this
is the mastermind they just arrested,
and our guy, Jayesh, actually met this guy,
Sagar "Shaggy" Thakar,
a 24-year-old entrepreneur who was the mastermind.
He had multiple boiler rooms all over India and Malaysia.
The reason he eventually turned himself in,
and this is just last month, according to news reports,
was that his girlfriend threatened
to break up with him if he didn't turn himself in,
and that's the only reason he turned himself in I guess.
It's the power of love, you know.
[ Laughter ]
But the thing that really kind of boggles my mind
is how they actually got people to pay the money.
Remember how he said, at one point,
that, "You owe $7,212 exactly?"
They have them go down to Walmart or a department store
and buy iTunes cards, you know, like $500.
"Put $500 on an iTunes card,
then call me and read me back the number."
Once you read them back that number,
that money, they can cash that money,
and it's gone forever, and you can't trace it,
and how they convince them to go from,
"You owe the IRS money,"
to, "You've got to buy an iTunes card,"
we explored this with Jayesh at length,
and it's this convoluted thing about,
"Well, we have a partnership with them,
and it's an electronic transfer system,"
and it really doesn't make any sense,
but remember, again,
us sitting on the outside of this transaction,
you're not under the ether,
the emotional vibrations they've created,
the fear they've created.
You're not thinking rationally.
You just want to get out of it,
and they give you a way to get out of it.
They'll even hire a cab to come to your house,
take you down to the local Walmart to get these iTunes --
You know, it's just crazy how they can be convincing.
So the IRS has warnings.
You will hear this over and over again.
Obviously they don't --
You don't pay your tax bill by getting a green dot card
or wiring money or anything like that.
We all know that.
We need to keep warning people of that.
IRS will never call or robo-dial you
without first sending you written notice.
The IRS did just recently announce
that they will be contracting with collection agencies
to do some of the collection of back debts, which we have --
is worrisome to me because the con artists
will be able to pretend to be those debt collection agencies,
but, nevertheless, they won't call
until they've written to you. You should know about it first.
You shouldn't just get a call, and if you do get a call,
obviously call independently and see what your tax status is.
So that's the IRS scam,
taking you inside the boiler room,
trying to unmask some of these people
and show you who they are.
The next one I want to get to is,
and again, you'll hear more about this from Courtney
because she's really the expert, but the tech support thing,
you saw that 56% of the people
in the state of Washington we surveyed
had some kind of tech support scam experience
in the last year.
This guy worked --
Well, let's just play the video, and we'll introduce you to him.
-Meet Dan Goldstein.
Posing as a computer technician, he was part of an operation
that sold phony computer support services over the phone.
-The consumers would end up on the phone with me
by either seeing an advertisement
or by actively looking out for a PC cleaner,
which was a downloadable software
that they could put on their system
that would clean the background of their files
and speed up their PC.
-Dan's outfit operated a boiler room in South Florida
under a variety of names.
The company and its various aliases were all sued
by the Federal Trade Commission in 2014.
-It was just a very large open area with approximately,
I'd say, about 12 or 13 tables
that were probably 40 to 50-feet-long each,
and each table was packed with computers
and people sitting in front of every computer.
The first couple of tables were called the bone pickers.
Their job was to pick the meat off the bone,
essentially try and get as much money
that we couldn't get from you at the beginning.
-Dan's job was to get the caller to give him control
of their computer and then sell the victim
a variety of computer tech support services,
none of them with any real value,
that could add up to thousands of dollars.
-I didn't go in, again, knowing that it was a scam,
but when the FTC brought it down,
by that point, I was well aware of what the company was.
It hit me that what we were doing was, indeed,
very dishonest and immoral,
and you started to really see that what was happening
was not exactly what we were presenting.
-Pleased, right? So how does this work?
And, again, I'm going to describe
just one iteration of the tech support scam.
I think Courtney is going to talk about other examples,
but in this particular case,
he's talking about the Federal Trade Commission,
Chuck's organization, and the Florida AG's office
brought suit against this company.
This was in 2014,
and essentially what they were alleging
is that you'd go online.
You're worried that your computer is running slowly, say,
so you'll either see a pop-up ad,
or you'll Google, you know,
how to fix my computer or how to clean my computer,
and something like this ad will come up, PC Cleaner.
You can fix, clean and speed up your PC in minutes.
There is a free scan, they'll say, you know,
so you click on it to scan your computer
to see whether there's any problems with it,
and one of the things the FTC did in this case
that I thought was very creative is they hired a computer expert,
and they set up the company by first buying a new computer
that had never been used,
having the expert look at it in detail.
It's running perfectly.
There's no problems with it,
and then they clicked on this software,
and this is the screen that always comes up,
and this screen says
that you've got 8,056 problems with your computer.
There is 928 problems about viruses.
There is 6,800 and -- There's traced temp files.
This is counting all kinds of things on your computer
that are on everyone's computer,
and doesn't mean that there's anything wrong with it,
but you look at this, and you say, "Oh, my God.
There's 8,056 things wrong," right?
So then they'll say, "Fix all."
See the button that says, "Fix all"?
You'll click that.
You pay them $30, so now they have your credit card,
and it downloads the software, and they say,
"To activate this software, you have to call an 800 number."
You don't, really, but everyone calls the 800 number.
425,000 people called this over
about a 2-year period,
and when they call, that's when they get this guy.
He's in the room,
and then he takes us through what happens next.
-My job then would be to access your computer remotely.
The first thing I would do would be to pull up your task manager.
We would go right down here where it says,
"Processes: 94," and I would tell you,
"Oh, my God. You have so many things
running in the background. This is insane.
No wonder your computer is moving so slowly,"
and you can see even though it's 94 processes,
it's really not using any of your computer,
but people don't know that.
All they see is this giant number here,
and I say, "You shouldn't have anything more than 10."
-He'd say, "10" if it was 94,
but if there were 340, he'd say, "39."
He had this formula where whatever the number
of processes running were, I would just say,
"You shouldn't have more than 10% of that," right,
which means it's not really analyzing anything.
He's just making it up, and so --
But this starts to scare a person, right?
Not only were there 8,056 things wrong,
but now there's this problem with the processes,
the task manager,
and then he takes it a step, another step.
All of these are fear tactics that get you, again,
into the ether of fear and anxiety,
so you're not thinking clearly.
Then he goes to the error log tactic.
-Without question, the scare tactic
that worked best was the error log.
It was the cherry on the icing of the cake, essentially,
is all of a sudden this error log would come up,
and for most people's computers,
it would have thousands and thousands
and thousands of errors from the day they owned the computer,
and that was certainly an eye-opener
for a lot of people to think that
there was definitely something going on behind the scenes
that they didn't realize was happening with the computer.
-But what are those error logs, right?
You get these screens.
Everybody has these.
It's another one of those things on a computer
if you tried to log onto a website,
and your Wi-Fi wasn't on, error, right?
Your virus might detect a bad website, warning, right?
That's warning you of people like him, not warning you
there's something wrong with your computer,
but they use stuff that's on the computer
that's benign to get you
to think that they need the problem,
and, of course, all of it leads to the --
what it really leads to is you buying,
spending $300 to get it fixed,
and one of the questions we asked him was,
these people in the rooms,
were they really people from Microsoft?
I mean, are they digital crime unit work?
They link them up to the digital crime?
No, probably not.
Here is what he said.
-Nobody in that room was a certified computer expert.
Anybody that you would actually ever get on the phone
with as a consumer had no actual background in knowing computers
and, you know, really being
what you would consider a "expert" of computers.
Most of the people that I would say were in there
were current or ex-alcoholics or drug addicts,
and a very large chunk of them actually were currently living
in sober facility halfway houses.
If people knew the inner workings of who they were
actually speaking to on the phone,
there's no doubt in my mind that 95% of those people
would have hung up the phone as soon as they got on with us,
without question.
-And, you know, one of the things --
I can verify this because we were getting lists in Florida.
When you have a telemarketing room,
you have to register all of the people
who work in that room with the state,
so we were getting Freedom of Information Act requests
from them, getting names of hundreds of these people,
and a lot of them had criminal records.
You can look that up.
These are the people who you're getting on the phone
who take over your computer.
You know, in order to do this, you've got to give them
permission to take over your computer.
The bottom line is it's just something to really avoid,
you know?
FTC filed a law suit,
got a temporary injunction against them.
This company took in $120 million in about 2 years
doing this thing that we've just described,
and there are many more out there.
Courtney is going to talk more about them.
I have to say, we've been working with Microsoft on this,
and I know they've been working with law enforcement.
Every time I call an AG, they go, "Oh, yeah.
We've worked with a digital crime unit,"
you know, "They are really trying"
because a lot of these companies will wrap
the cloak of legitimacy around them by saying,
"I'm a partner with Microsoft,"
and that's an abuse of Microsoft's logo,
but they will -- or some other company, Apple,
"I'm working with Apple," because that legitimizes them,
and it's really hard to keep control
over all of those claims, but that's what they do.
So how do you avoid it?
Don't download free software to clean your computer.
If you think it's going slowly, take it down to Best Buy
or some retail store front,
a Microsoft store where you've got a technician
who is certified and who can look at it.
Don't click on pop-ups. A lot of these pop-ups --
One of the other versions of this
that we wrote about in the AARP magazine
was there is this cloaking device that they use.
So you click on a pop-up for, say, dog food.
You're looking for dog food, and it's benign.
You're looking for dog food, right, you Google it.
You click on it.
It's not really an ad for dog food.
There's a cloaking device that makes it look like that ad,
and behind that is this thing called the blue screen of death,
and this thing comes up, and just all of a sudden,
there's a blue screen, and it says,
"Your computer has got a virus," right?
Well, all you did was click on a dog food ad,
and now your thing is shut down, and, "Oh, what do I do," right?
So there's a lot of that going on out here,
and it's really just hard to --
You know, it's just hard to know.
You can't completely avoid it all the time,
but on this cleaning your PC, clearly the thing to do
is to not respond to pop-up ads,
and if you're concerned, as I said,
about the speed of your computer,
take it to an authorized repair place.
Other impostor scams to watch out for --
I'm not going to go into detail here.
I could talk all day about them, but the grandparent scam,
how many of you have ever gotten that call?
Have you?
Someone posing as your grandson in Mexico,
anybody want to give an example of that, anybody?
-I got one for my nephew,
and they had the right first name,
but the voice was not right.
-Yeah. -So that's what's what threw me.
I wasn't able to -- I did talk to him a while.
I said, "Oh. How is Larry?"
his dad, and he made some, you know,
comment about how he's fine or something like that,
but the more he talked, the more I was able to realize
this was not my nephew. -What did he tell you?
Was he trapped somewhere? -Yeah.
He was in Seattle, as a matter of fact.
He was in the police station,
and he needed X number of dollars
to get himself out of the police station.
He was in Seattle, you know.
-Yeah, and so you eventually just hung up on him?
-I did. I did. Yeah.
I felt -- I mean, I even felt guilty for doing so.
-Did you call -- -He's my nephew.
-Did you call your nephew and verify that he wasn't --
-Well, I wouldn't have called him.
I would have called his dad. -Yeah.
-I don't remember.
It's been a while yet, but I got another one.
The jury -- The not --
-That was the next one on my list.
Look at this... -Yes, that one.
That one, they got it.
-...fake jury duty. -They got me there.
I -- just exactly what you said about the emotional, the fear.
The sheriff was going to come to my door
and put me in the back seat in handcuffs.
I could not stand to think of my neighbors watching this happen,
and I race out to my credit union in Tukwila
to get money for a PayPal card, bought it, sent it off,
and as soon as I sent it off, I relaxed,
and I realized what had happened,
and I called the police department,
and they said,"Yeah, that's happening these days."
-So on the one hand, you were relieved,
and then right after that,
you felt horrible that you had been scammed kind of.
-Yes. -It's kind of a mixed emotion.
-I still feel terrible. -Yeah.
-I'm still angry with PayPal for not getting my money back.
-Yeah. Yeah.
Yes. -That was a terrible one.
Sorry. -Great story.
Thank you for sharing that. Yes, ma'am?
-The grandparent scam happened to my dad
when I happened to be visiting him,
and one thing that my son, supposed son, said was,
"Please don't tell my mother. Don't call them,"
and even though my father had read about this scam
in Consumer Reports, he still fell for it.
-Oh. He did?
-He went to Western Union, and luckily he had wrote down
the wrong phone number or something,
and so he didn't send the money.
-Oh. -But he --
What amazed me was he had heard about this scam,
but he still thought this time it wasn't a scam.
It sounded so much like my son.
-Yeah, and they have different ways of doing that, like,
"Grandpa," and then you say the name,
and now, they're, "Yes. This is David.
Yeah. My name is David." Right, right, very clever.
Yes, sir?
-I even had a call questioning the last name of my mother.
Well, I don't know how they got my name,
and they wanted to have more information about my mother,
and I says, "You know, she was born in the Ukraine.
She immigrated to South America,"
and "What was her maiden name?"
So I said to them, "You know, the maiden name was Lenin.
She was a cousin, you know, of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
who ran the communist revolution."
[ Laughter ]
-Now you're playing with him. You're playing with him, right?
-And the guy said, "Actually, you know, my name, Louis,
well, thank you very much.
It was a pleasure to talk to you," and he hung up.
-So you saw that coming, but what were they doing there?
Why did they want the maiden name?
What do you think?
-I don't think they got to that
because they couldn't get to the maiden
so they really asked me,
and I said, "I'll give them the story."
So when I assumed there was more than that,
when they heard the story, they said,
"Well, this guy probably won't work with this guy," you know.
-All I was going to point out
there was that's a phishing scam because --
and the reason they want the maiden name is often that
is a security question on your Facebook account
or some other social media account,
and, you know, we had this conversation last night
when I was talking to some folks about David Morros --
Raise your hand, David.
David is a new volunteer from Tennessee.
He's going to volunteer for us for the Fraud Watch Network
and an expert in cyber crime,
and we were talking about Facebook,
and he and I were both going, "Yeah. We don't use Facebook.
It's just --" because Facebook is where
a lot of personal information gets posted,
and if you don't have your privacy settings right --
I'm not an expert on Facebook, but I can just tell you
as a crime prevention person a lot of the scammers --
I mean, we interviewed an ID thief a couple years ago
who would just go on --
That's the first thing she would do
when she was trying to target somebody
is go onto their Facebook page and find out birth dates,
names of relatives, maiden names,
all things that you want to share about yourself
just because it's Facebook, and you want to share yourself,
but they can use that then to hack in,
so Face -- I don't know how we got --
Thank you for those stories, though, very helpful.
A lottery/prize scam,
anybody know someone who's gotten a lot of these mailers?
I continually worry about these older folks, in particular.
Our research has shown that that's --
A lot of older folks get these lottery scams,
and then the last on is the government grant scheme.
You've just won, you know, an $8,000 grant for free.
All you have to do is pay, you know, $250,
and we'll send you your $8,000 free grant money,
so that just preys on, you know, gullibility.
Most of them are trying to get you into the emotional state.
♪♪