It's possible that most commenters here are right, that the writer just has inferior reasoning capabilities compared to us, and that there's no way any of us could possibly fall for such a scam.<p>But I think it's more likely that there are techniques scammers can use to incrementally build trust, and that the rest of us would be wise to watch out for such techniques being used against us.<p>Quote: <i>If it was a scam, I couldn’t see the angle. It had occurred to me that the whole story might be made up or an elaborate mistake. But no one had asked me for money or told me to buy crypto; they’d only encouraged me not to share my banking information. They hadn’t asked for my personal details; they already knew them. I hadn’t been told to click on anything.</i><p>The writer had carried on entire conversations with Krista and Calvin which lacked a scam angle. This wore the writer down to where she was more receptive to the stories being told to her. This is a warning to the rest of us to keep our guard up even after such conversations.<p><i>When I posed this theory to Saul Kassin, a psychology professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice who studies coerced confessions, he agreed. “If someone is trying to get you to be compliant, they do it incrementally, in a series of small steps that take you farther and farther from what you know to be true,” he said. “It’s not about breaking the will. They were altering the sense of reality.”</i>
Folks here seem happy to dunk on her, but her brother's take seems more reasonable:<p>> It was my brother, the lawyer, who pointed out that what I had experienced sounded a lot like a coerced confession. “I read enough transcripts of bad interrogations in law school to understand that anyone can be convinced that they have a very narrow set of terrible options,” he said.
><i>At about 12:30 p.m., my phone buzzed. The caller ID said it was Amazon. I answered.</i><p>This is a terrible story and I feel for the person affected.<p>The lesson here is that there's no reason at al to answer any inbound phone call if it's not a personal contact.<p>There are only two reasons someone you don't know may be calling you:<p>- to sell you something<p>- to scam you<p>If it appears important like your bank or a government agency then <i>call them back</i> and <i>do not answer</i>. There is no upside and a potentially disastrous downside for trusting an inbound request of any kind.
For those that were curious and didn't want to read this long article. This is a very common scam. "Family Emergency Scams". <a href="https://consumer.ftc.gov/articles/scammers-use-fake-emergencies-steal-your-money" rel="nofollow">https://consumer.ftc.gov/articles/scammers-use-fake-emergenc...</a><p>The woman went to the bank and withdrew $50k in cash. The article makes no mention of the bank warning or asking any questions. Banks and Tellers absolutely need to be taught to warn people of these scams. It has saved many people in the past by just simply raising awareness.
The scam here was threats through external calls, pretending to be authoritative agencies (FTC, CIA). The scam would have been prevented if the person had actively sought contact to those agencies to validate the claims of the callers.<p>Never trust someone who calls <i>you</i> with extreme, urgent bad news. Use validated, known means of contact for whoever they pretend to represent and validate.
If you read this and think "what an idiot" instead of thinking "is there any way a variant of a scam like this could work on me?" you're doing yourself a disservice.
I don't think this happened. Too much of it doesn't add up. I'm especially hung up on going to a major US bank and asking to withdraw $50,000 on no notice, with minimal ceremony. At the least, they'd be filling out a SAR, right? I am speaking from some experience with large (and carefully papered, unlike this one!) transactions with Bank of America.<p>The suggestibility details in the story don't add up. She attempts to verify the CIA agent, is told to check an incoming number, <i>knows that incoming numbers can be forged</i>, but buys that government numbers can't be? There are too many places in this story where we're asked to let the author have it both ways: she knows something is wrong, specifically, but is going along anyways.<p>It's not at all clear why she couldn't call the police; it's just stated, at one point early in the article, that she concluded that she couldn't. What's the rationale for that one? The scammer might be in the local police department? Like Agent Koutris in Season 2 of the Wire?<p>I'm also hung up in the scammers showing up, in person, in a Mercedes. They have not in fact hacked this person's whole life (that isn't really a thing), so they don't know that the police haven't been contacted. But they're showing up, at her house, in a car probably worth more than the $50k that they're hoping to collect. Here I have just a basic Bayesian problem: the Venn diagram of people who can cough up $50k who won't contact the police, such that the handoff is a setup, is slim. It's not that it's impossible; it could happen. But the base rate is very low. As a strategy, that is a very effective way to lose a white Mercedes SUV.<p>I'm registering a prediction that another shoe is going to drop on this story.<p>Two pieces of corroborating information that are gettable:<p>* The police report that she says was filed on October 31 is a public record subject to FOIA.<p>* The handout her bank gave her about "not getting scammed" when she withdrew the 500 $100 bills should be available to anyone who asks.
Last night I stayed up late to crunch on a deadline, so my brain cells are slower than usual...but did anyone else not realize on first read that, according to the author, happened in a just <i>SIX HOURS</i>?<p>> <i>That morning — it was October 31 — I dressed my toddler in a pizza costume for Halloween and kissed him good-bye before school. I wrote some work emails. At about 12:30 p.m., my phone buzzed. The caller ID said it was Amazon. I answered...</i><p>> <i>I met the SUV at the curb and put the money in the back seat. It was 6:06 p.m. Even if I’d tried to see who was driving, the windows were tinted and it was dusk. He maybe wore a baseball cap. When I turned around, I could see the backlit faces of my husband and son watching from our apartment nine stories above. As I walked back inside, Michael texted me a photo of a Treasury check made out to me for $50,000 and told me a hard copy would be hand-delivered to me in the morning.</i><p>The amount of convoluted bullshit that the "CIA" and "FTC" investigators fed her, I automatically assumed that developed over the course of a week at minimum, as do many Nigerian prince/pig-butchering scams in which the scammer ends up geting to know the victim's personal life (and sources of funding) as well as an actual close friend.<p>Withdrawing $50,000 in cash from your bank in a single day between taking your kid to school and then trick-or-treating is impressive enough under any circumstance. But I can't imagine hearing and processing all that bullshit (nevermind believing it!) in a single day
I think the biggest protection against this kind of scam right now is just treat every incoming call or message as untrusted. Since caller ID spoofing is just left completely unchecked by the government and telcos.<p>Anyone who calls me out of the blue is a huge red flag, I don't engage with them other than asking what they are calling about, if it sounds like something real then I hang up and call back through the public listed number of whoever they claim to be.
Im amazed she pulled the money out so easily. A few times I've bought shitmobile cars for 5k+ plus cash and the teller always spends 5 minutes typing up a SAR before they hand it to me and always interrogate why and seem annoyed. WTF bank does she have that they just grab 50k no questions asked?
The real crime in this story is that telcos <i>still</i> haven't stopped the ability to spoof caller ID.<p>In a just world her phone provider would be liable for the stolen money, along with all the other stolen money as a result of spoofed caller ID.<p>It is absolutely batshit insane that this is still an issue. Fucking fix it. Yes I am aware of STIR/SHAKEN, it should have been completed 20 years ago.
Here are audio recordings from actual conversations I had with scammers trying to pull a "family member in distress" scam:<p><a href="http://main.interstice.com:8090/?p=49" rel="nofollow">http://main.interstice.com:8090/?p=49</a>
The scammers seem so talented, I wonder how good they would do in a legitimate career in sales. If you can convince people to hand over 50k$ in cash to an unknown man in a car - what can't you sell?
I check on my mom and her finance about every week. As I said to her and others many times - don't do anything before calling a relative or the police. The simplest check can save you great pain - really simple when you think about it.
It seems like the main defense to this is to not have cash.<p>We all seem smart until we’re unreasonable. I don’t expect I’m stupid, but if someone threatens my kid, I probably get real dumb.<p>But if I don’t have cash, I don’t have cash. So the solution is to have failsafes so if we start getting cash to put into a box, someone questions us and convinces us that handing $50k into the window of a car driving by is a bad idea.<p>This person is brave for writing about how stupid they are.
Alright... I understand, anyone can get scammed, these scammers know what they're doing and all that, but come on. One fine afternoon you're on the phone with a CIA agent telling you to pull $50K out of your account and put it in a shoe box and hand it to some random dude in the street, all it would've taken to avoid this is to stop, breathe, think about what is happening and it would have been clear.
First, she was called by Amazon. First full stop -- these companies don't care about you enough to call you.<p>Second, they transferred her to an investigator with the FTC? Then they transferred her to someone with the CIA? Then that CIA agent said, "Withdraw 50,000 in cash, put it in a shoe box, and put it in a car that pulls up in front of your house."???<p>I know we aren't supposed to blame the victim, but Charlotte Cowles has no business being a "financial advice columnist".
Sure is a lot of victim blaming in here from people who have no understanding of the psychology of how getting scammed usually works. Scammers often ramp up the unreasonableness of their scams slowly. It starts out fairly reasonable, often with something urgent so as to induce stress. Then gets less so in small increments. People are inherently vulnerable to this.<p>All this ego-stroking(this would <i>never</i> happen to me, this is all her fault for being stupid and naïve) is frankly just asinine and immature. Hell, if you really think that, you're probably a prime target. This could happen to anyone.<p>Instead of victim blaming, which only makes it harder for people to share stories like this, we should be humble and constructive.
Title<p>> The Day I Put $50,000 in a Shoe Box and Handed It to a Stranger I never thought I was the kind of person to fall for a scam.<p>JFC, the best kind of Rube, the one who isn't even self aware at all.<p>My 70 year old parents became suspicious when their bank (lolno) asked them to wire $30K to cover fake legal fees, how do you fall for this shit?
People tell themselves all kinds of things to maintain their internal narrative about themselves. This person claims not to be a rube, yet engaged in many rube activities.<p>They knew about number spoofing but ignored it when told. They knew about checking with an attorney, but didn’t do so. So many points at which they could have stopped this and didn’t. They aren’t nearly as sophisticated as they claim in the opening.<p>Also, in general, you should already have cash stashed away, outside of a bank, in case this or a million other things actually happen. Your assets <i>can</i> be frozen without warning or evidence against you. Going to the bank to withdraw large sums because some guy on the phone claiming to be an authority says so is always stupid.
The story is obviously made up. Someone trying to become the main character or something. Maybe covering up a debt that is more embarrassing?<p>There are plenty of scams where someone calls unannounced, but the idea that they are going to have willing Enemy of the State style targets with such predictability that they can have people on the ground doing cash pick ups, and also never getting caught, is simply less credible than like any number of alternatives IMO.