(KTLA) – “He told me my home was being watched, my laptop had been hacked, and we were in imminent danger.”
That’s the scenario that played out this past October for Charlotte Cowles, a financial advice columnist for The Cut, a lifestyle and women’s interest publication underneath the umbrella of New York Magazine.
Since 2016, Cowles has written a regular column for the site called “My Two Cents,” in which she responds to reader questions about personal finance, saving money, creating budgets and, among other topics, avoiding scams.
But last year on Halloween, Cowles said she found herself on the other end of the exchange, her expertise not preventing her from falling victim to a complex scheme that resulted in her giving a scammer much of her life’s savings.
She wrote about the experience in an article for The Cut, detailing the many missed signs and red flags she ignored en route to giving a stranger a shoe box filled with $50,000 in cash.
It started with a call from someone claiming to be from Amazon who was flagging unusual charges. The “Amazon” rep asked her if she had recently purchased $8,000 worth of Apple products. Cowles hadn’t, and she even checked her recent orders to confirm as much. The woman on the other end of the line told her that Amazon had a record of two accounts, one personal and one a business account.
Cowles said she didn’t have a business account. The columnist determined it must have been fraud on her account, which was apparently a big problem at the world’s top online retailer.
“It had become so pervasive that the company was working with a liaison at the Federal Trade Commission and was referring defrauded customers to him,” Cowles wrote.
Before she knew it, Cowles was connected to someone purporting to be an FTC agent, then a CIA agent. Each gave her badge numbers, callback phone numbers, and other assurances it was official. The “agents” knew the last four digits of her social security number, her address, and other identifying features.
The scammers, posing as law enforcement, told her the fraudulent charges were part of a much bigger criminal conspiracy.
“He told me that 22 bank accounts, nine vehicles, and four properties were registered to my name. The bank accounts had wired more than $3 million overseas, mostly to Jamaica and Iraq,” she wrote in the article. He then sent her an image of a woman’s ID, which he said was found near the Mexico border in a car rented under her name with blood and drugs in the trunk.
The man then told her she was being charged with cybercrimes, drug trafficking and money laundering.
The article details how she was convinced to withdraw $50,000 from her bank accounts and eventually hand it over to a stranger posing as an undercover CIA agent.
After the driver left, the realization washed over her: She’d been had.
The story is written as a cautionary tale of how even an intelligent well-versed financial expert could become a victim to a scammer.
Online commenters pointed out even more red flags that Cowles didn’t realize even after the fact. CIA doesn’t operate domestically, unlike the FBI. If she had known the difference between the two agencies, she may have dodged a bullet, they said.
Still, some on social media applauded Cowles for her vulnerability and her willingness to be the butt of the joke when many scam victims are often too overburdened by shame to admit they’d been duped.
The FTC, which does actually investigate consumer fraud, has a list of four telltale signs that a seeming emergency is a scam.
A scammer will pretend to be from an organization their target knows or recognizes, like the FTC, the CIA or Amazon.com. They’ll say there is a problem, like that your accounts will be frozen because you’re wanted for international crimes. They’ll pressure you to act immediately, perhaps ordering you to go to your bank right away. And they’ll also tell you to pay a specific way, often through cryptocurrency, gift cards or payment apps.
Anyone who believes they may have been the victim of a scam can file a report with the FTC. They should also contact local law enforcement.
The FTC also offers instructions for what victims should do in the event of a scam.
To read Cowles’ entire story on The Cut, click here.
