It was a normal day. I was sitting in the
kitchen, puzzling. The phone rang, I answered it. Hello.
Person, hysterically crying on the phone said I've been
in a car accident. I have a broken nose and a split lip.
Greg, is that you? He said, Yes. He said, You need to
call my lawyer gave me a number and a name. He said,
Please don't tell anybody. I said, please let me call
your father, please. He said No, please don't call daddy,
I'll explain later. He said, You need to call my lawyer.
You need to get me out of here. And he gave me his
telephone number. And name. I call the public defender
who said he hit a pregnant woman, eight months
pregnant, and she had a broken wrist. The good thing
was she didn't lose a baby. She's stable. He said I
needed in order to get him out. I needed to get $8,000.
And he said it needed to be in cash. They said don't
call anybody. You can't tell anybody drove to the bank
got the money. Then I called back. I gave them everything
they needed. He said that he would see if they had a
courier to pick up the money. They told me to put
it into a shoebox. And courier walked up the
driveway, and he took the money, threw it in the
backseat. And he left then I waited. I thought it would
take time for the judge to let my grandson out. So I
waited for a little while. And then I tried to call my
grandson after a couple hours to reach him. I didn't
reach him. He called me finally. And I said When did
you get out? And he said, What? What are you talking
about? And that's when I knew that I was so emotional
and shaken that I wasn't thinking at all I lost
$8,000 which was almost half of my savings.
In a nutshell, any inbound communication that tries to
defraud people of money, whether that is a voice
scam, which we call a call of a phone call, which we
call vishing. Or it is a text message, a fraudulent
text message or a scam text message, which we call
smishing SMS phishing. They look very similar to what
we've come to know in terms of email spam and phishing,
but they're much more immediate. And actually,
there's a very tight call to action, which is why the
phone is the perfect device to attack.
In 2021, the Federal Trade Commission or FTC, received
about 1.8 million fraud complaints. In about 36% of
those complaints. The contact method began with a
phone call. Phone scams come in many forms, but officials
have categorized the most common ones. imposter scams,
debt relief or credit repair scams, business and
investment scams, charity scams, extended car
warranties, free trials, Loan Scams prize and lottery
scams and travel and timeshare scams. 82 year old
New Jersey resident Libby more became the target of an
imposter scam in September.
Normally, I don't answer the phone. This time I did. And
the phone I did not know who was on the phone. Most times
I never answered the phone unless I know who's calling
me.
phone scams have been on the rise as of May 2022. About
70 million Americans have fallen victim to a phone
scam. In the past 12 months or
so we saw an increase from $30 billion to $40 billion
in lost to American consumers based on phone
scams. One is that it's very cheap, right? It's very
cheap to set up an automatic dialer. And to plug a bunch
of phone numbers into it. Whether they're random or
they they are very intentional by geography or
by demographic, and place millions of phone calls in a
very short period of time because it's a numbers game,
right? We know that not everybody's not going to be
susceptible. But you don't have to get that many. I
think the second reason is that the mobile telephone is
the mobile devices ubiquitous. Everybody has
one and we all spend far too much time looking at them.
And that's all demographics. You want me to buy $30,000
worth of target cards. Now
you might have seen videos around the internet and
content creators who are sort of scamming the
scammers.
I get this straight it's that if I don't get you the
money today, you're gonna lose your job. Hey, I'm
Kitboga, and I spend the majority of my time Trying
to convince scammers that I'm the perfect victim. In
general scam baiting is becoming the perfect hitting
target for a scammer baiting them into believing that
they should spend all of their time and effort
focusing on you. These guys will make 1000s of calls,
trying to get somebody who will say, Yes, I will let
you on my computer, or I will go buy gift cards or
whatever their scam is. And so my job or a scam writers
job is to become that perfect victim, who seems
like they're going to comply with everything. But in the
end, we are just collecting information and reporting it
to like fraud professionals, or otherwise wasting their
time. Almost every scammer that I've talked to will
give some sense of urgency. And they will kind of make
demands as if you have to respond right now. You have
to listen to everything that they're saying. They'll
often tell you not to hang up the phone. No, no, no,
no, no, don't, don't hang up. You have to do this
right now. Don't talk to any of your family members. It's
very, they're trying to take advantage of the moment.
All I heard was, we're not allowed to tell anybody.
And, you know, if I had just called one person, they
could have talked me down, we could have rationalized
it. I wasn't thinking at all, I was just shaken. My
whole body was shaken and I was emotional.
If they have your attention, and you're trusting them,
they have to make their scam happen immediately. Because
they know that if you hang up and talk to someone else
in your family, or you stop and you start to think about
what's happening, often you will realize that something
doesn't add up. So yeah, a common thread is the the
urgency and the threats.
My job is at stake because it was my mistake, instead
of putting up a number correctly.
Contrary to popular belief, younger Americans appear
more likely to lose money to a phone scam than their
older counterparts. Also, men are more likely to be
scammed than women.
I do think it's a very common misconception that
only the older generation gets scammed. I see it in
youtube comments or in conversations with people.
But I get emails and messages, probably every day
of someone falling for a scam. And most of those
messages are our younger people. And they'll tell me
their stories about whether it was a dating scam, or
some of them are the these tech support scams. And a
common thread is they were busy, they weren't really
paying attention to the script or what was going on.
And, and they, they fell for it. And so I think any it
can happen to anyone.
And I'm surprised that young people are getting scammed
because I find that young people don't trust the way
we do it from my generation, I think they're less
trusting one,
they really are attached to their fonts to because so
much of this is based on social engineering, the
younger generation has exchanged convenience for
privacy. And they share so much about their lives on
social media, that it's very easy to go in and say okay,
I know where he went to school. I know who has
connections are, I know where he works. I know what
he buys. Right? And so if you think about the the
ability for social engineers, to get that type
of information and target individuals, it's much
easier in that set.
Don't answer the phone, especially if you don't know
the number. Let him leave a voicemail if you want, and
you can listen to it later.
When it comes to the texts, do not click on links that
are in text messages, right? Make sure unless you can,
it's a very simple thing to do. If you get a text,
scroll up and see if you've ever gotten a text from them
before.
Ask them for a case number. If it's your credit card
company and they're saying there's a problem with your
credit card account, ask them for a case number, ask
them for their employee ID and hang up and then call
the number on the back of your credit card. It makes
sure that you know who you're calling. It's so easy
for someone to spoof a phone number from your local
police department or from your credit card company. So
I try to tell people keep that in mind.
Register with the FTC Do Not Call list right? Make sure
that you just go to the FTC website you'll find it very
easy if you search for do not call and register with
it on that list and That means nobody that doesn't
have a relationship with you that you haven't consented
or given permission to call you is supposed to be able
to call you. Businesses should only be able to call
you if they have a relationship.
I were vulnerable. You know, I hate the thought that
there are people like this in the world that would do
something like this. I feel sorry for these people who
do this, because they are very sad human beings.