Robocall Scams Exist Because They Work--One Woman's Story Shows How
The FBI agent sounded official on the phone. He gave Nina Belis his badge number and a story about how her identity had been compromised. She gave him her life’s savings. For most Americans, robocalls are an annoyance. For Ms. Belis, an oncology nurse in her 60s, a law-enforcement impersonation scam that appeared to have started with a robocall drew her into financial losses that sapped her family’s nest egg and derailed her retirement. The scale of her loss—nearly $340,000—and the ease with which the money was moved out of her accounts show why scam calls persist. They work, even on people who think they would never fall for one.
The caller preyed on what psychologists describe as a habitual reliance on people in authority, and kept Ms. Belis in a state of isolation and heightened emotion to cloud her judgment. He told Ms. Belis her Social Security number had been stolen and that crimes had been committed under her name, and persuaded her to transfer assets to accounts he controlled on the pretext of protecting the funds. He coached the New York-area resident on how to satisfy compliance questions at financial institutions as she moved the funds and kept her on the phone for hours at a time. In the first nine months of the year, the Federal Trade Commission received more than 139,000 reports of fraud in which people claimed to be from the Social Security Administration, with losses totaling nearly $30 million.
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A few years from retirement, Ms. Belis had emigrated from Eastern Europe, where she was a doctor, about 20 years ago with her husband, who had been a surgeon there. She said she was fearful her savings would become inaccessible. The voice mail that started the scam came at a difficult time for Ms. Belis. Her husband was recovering from cancer treatment and one of her daughters had recently suffered a stillbirth.
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A customer-service representative at her retirement-account administrator asked why she was withdrawing the $273,000 in her account, but the scammer had prepared her to answer questions. She said she was using it to open a business—the fake agent had made her believe that everything about the purported identity-theft investigation had to remain secret. She paid more than $50,000 in taxes when she withdrew the retirement funds on Tuesday, and transferred the rest to her account at Citibank. On Wednesday, Ms. Belis sent $190,000 from her Citibank account to a second account at the Panama bank Banistmo. She believed the ordeal was over. After dinner on Sunday, she thought the transaction had cleared and told her husband she was feeling better. He asked to see the paperwork, and she showed it to him. When he saw that the money had been moved to a bank in Panama, alarm bells rang.
He realized it was fraud, and the couple went to see one of their daughters. They called Citibank that night to stop the transfer, but the fraud department was closed. They went to the police and filed a report at 8:30 p.m. It was 12 days since she first received the scammer’s voice mail. Ms. Belis’s losses, including taxes she paid when withdrawing her retirement funds, the banking fees and hotel and taxi costs, totaled $337,105.
More..
https://www.wsj.com/articles/robocall-scams-exist-because-they-workone-womans-story-shows-how-11574351204 (paid subscription)
= new reply since forum marked as read
Most of these robo-dialed calls will show "no name" or "caller unknown" or some other fake name. Some use a fake 800 number but no name as the ID. Lately my caller ID is showing "spam" or "possible spam" as the caller ID as a way to help me identify the caller.
I've had Verizon Fios for the last 10 years or so, and Verizon has finally - very recently - cut way down on the spam, spoofed, robo-dialed calls. Since the beginning of November I've gotten way fewer calls and almost none are robo-dialed. This just goes to show that they could have stopped these fake calls long ago but they chose not to. Now it's in Verizon's best interest to put these scammers out of business.
Use your number blocking function and fill it with all the spam numbers. I can have up to 200 numbers blocked on my Verizon landline phone and it has made a big difference.
