04/04/2021
Tech note: This Is the Most Common Scam That I See, Thanks to My Bank, and It’s One That You Can Avoid.
A scammer’s goal is to get you on the phone.
A scammer’s goal is to get you on the phone.
A scammer’s goal is to get you on the phone.
I once had a philosophy instructor in Junior College whose sure-fire note-taking tips included writing down anything that the instructor said three times.
If you write down the above words and tape them to the edge of your computer screen, you can head off trouble at the pass. Or more accurately, you can prevent a problem that’s merely scary and annoying from becoming an enormous problem that’s REALLY expensive and super embarrassing. It's like the difference between accidently getting stupid drunk and accidentally getting a DUI, and it costs about the same.
In the term “con man”, the “con” part of it stands for “confidence”. The scammer will gain your trust and affinity - your confidence - and will talk his way into your life. He's very good at it. All he has to do is get you on the phone, and then you’re like putty in his hands. You'll feel like you've gotten a great new collaborator, and maybe even a mentor, for some of your most annoying difficulties.
There are three main ways that they get you on the phone:
1) They call you. With a cold call and a fake Caller ID, he tells you that your computer is sending out viruses and that his company works with Microsoft and that your problem really should be fixed immediately. If you had already been thinking that your computer seems to need a tune up or something, and that you were going to call your computer support person in a few days anyway, you’re especially going to believe this guy on the phone and you’ll likely decide that you might as well let him fix it right now and get it over with, and thereby also avoid my astronomically high fees while you’re at it. (My fees aren't actually astronomically high. They're like a car mechanic's. But the spouses of the computer-addicted sometimes think they are, and they often take their home's phone calls, so with that justification they sometimes feel like they’re doing an intervention and saving unnecessary computer service expense with the help of the nice new man who called them on the phone.)
2) You call them. A screen pops up on your computer that locks you out and has a toll free phone number you're supposed to call. The pop up screen says it temporarily locked your computer to prevent a dangerous problem from continuing and that you need to call this number so that they can unlock your computer and fix the original problem before there is any further damage to your computer. You can’t seem to do anything else anyway because your computer is locked up somehow, so you call the number on the screen. (If you call me instead, I can walk you through how to get out of that screen and get back to work.)
3) You do a Google search for Google’s phone number. Or for Comcast’s phone number. Or Yahoo’s. Or Microsoft’s. Or AT&T’s. Or McAfee’s. Or Norton’s. Or Facebook’s. Or Amazon’s. Or any of the big and well-known companies that sometimes are hard to contact by phone after they have reached the lofty business level of being "too big to call". Almost everyone does this, searches for phone numbers on Google. The scammers are happy to provide you with their phone numbers in the search results, and then are more-than-happy to help you with your Google/Comcast/Microsoft/Whatever problem. When you search for a big tech company’s phone number, YOU ARE MORE LIKELY TO GET A SCAMMER’S PHONE NUMBER than the real company’s phone number. Google has made improvements here at the top of the search results page, and more "too big to call" companies are now offering phone numbers to take away some of the low hanging fruit from scammers, but the right number can't always fill the entire page. There can be a lot of wrong numbers on that page, too, especially in the sponsored links at the top (it'll say "Ad" - that's the especially high danger zone). The scammers are that good at it. It’s how they make their living. They do it all day every day. The only way to be sure about a company’s phone number is to go to the company’s web site and look under Support > Contact Us. If there’s no number, there’s no number. That's not unheard of (although it is getting better). But, there are plenty of scammers with fake phone numbers for real and large companies that don't really want to talk to you as badly as the scammers do. McAfee doesn't want you to cancel your antivirus subscription with them, so they make their phone number difficult to find. Google doesn't want the whole world calling them over every single little thing that's bothering them just because Google is their friend. Yahoo... well, no one has ever known what the deal is with Yahoo anyway or why it's even still around. Same with AOL.
Okay so, the conman scammer guy (I haven’t heard of a scammer girl yet, and there aren't any in the photo below either) - the scammer guy convinces you to let him log onto your computer remotely to fix the (imaginary) problem. Then he shows you a lot of fake problems (that are actually routine error messages in a computer’s normal operation while some background processes wait for other processes to finish before they run). He pretends to fix it with mostly-do-nothing, light maintenance software, he might sell you something that you don't realize is unnecessary, and, if you’re lucky, he merely scams you at this step which is less expensive (usually under $1000) than the more common scam that would come later and which is an order of magnitude more expensive (or even two orders of magnitude, meaning 100 times more expensive). If he decides just to scam you here and be done with it, he tells you that "since they are international", and since your credit card company will therefore prevent an overseas payment and will not process their receipts (not true but it sounds good), his employer needs payment from you in gift cards that are honored internationally (such as Google Play or Apple Store/iTunes) which are sold in stores near you. He will stay on the phone with you while you drive to buy them. There’s probably nothing you can do once you’ve given them the numbers on the cards, but call the company number on the cards anyway once you realize that you’ve been scammed. They want to know and the info can be useful to them, and there's a slight chance that you'll be in time to cancel the card if the scammer hasn't gotten around to transferring the value yet to another card.
If he didn't scam you at this step, the next scam is the bigger, more common one which I’ve never seen cost less than $3000. It has almost cost as much as $80,000 locally, but it's usually under $10,000 because of the way the digits most often line up.
This is the refund scam.
He will normally start off, with your permission, just charging your credit card or your bank card a three-digit fee (under $1000) for services rendered. (See? Cards do work after all.) Sometimes he’ll call you every few weeks to see how your computer is running and he develops a friendship with you, although more recently this middle step seems to be shortened or omitted. You’ll be happy with his skill (although he’s not really doing anything that will find many problems in order to make you think that everything has been good between his calls, that your money was well-spent, and that his automatic software is doing its job). You’ll also be happy with his honestly and with how easy he is to work with.
Eventually, he’ll call you to say that his company was told to refund some or all of your money (sometimes you never actually paid them anything) because of blah-blah-blah and it’s all very believable, it’s free money, and what could possibly go wrong? Are these guys great, or what? He’s not asking for good faith money from you like real scammers do. You’re not risking anything at all. This guy has done a great job for you so far and has kept your computer running well for months, just like he said he would.
He needs to wire the refund directly to your bank "because my employer is international." He is "required by the regulations" to verify visually that the refund was received by your bank before he can end the call. He just needs to log back onto your computer (which sometimes he can already do without your knowledge) so he can observe while you log into your bank account online and watch the money appear in your checking account.
Here’s where the fun begins, although you won’t think so a bit later.
HIS NEXT TRICK IS TO TRANSFER MONEY FROM YOUR OWN SAVINGS ACCOUNT TO YOUR CHECKING ACCOUNT AND SAY THERE, THERE'S YOUR REFUND.
He does this one of two ways. One way is to do it while he's logged onto your computer at the same time that you're logged into your bank account, such as by tricking you into clicking along with him "for security reasons” leaving you confused and unsure of what he just did, and the other way is to log into your bank account on another browser window from his computer copying what he just saw you type in. He might even "need your bank password for the international money wire transfer," of course.
BUT SURPRISE, THERE WAS AN ERROR! AN ADDITIONAL DIGIT WAS "MISTAKENLY" ADDED TO THE (FAKE) "INTERNATIONAL WIRE TRANSFER" AMOUNT THROUGH "SOME SORT OF GLITCH", AND NOW IT'S A FOUR DIGIT NUMBER (INSTEAD OF THREE) THAT REACHES THE $1000 COLUMN.
The $1000 column, which was supposed to be 0, can now be any digit from 1 to 9, but it’s often the same digit as the one in the $100 column next to it so that it looks more like an honest typing mistake or even an understandable computer hiccup.
For example, he said he would refund you $300 and then moved $3300 from your savings to your checking account and called it a $3000 overpayment. The net result is: HE HAS (FAKE) OVER-REFUNDED YOU BY 10X.
In extreme cases, he adds two digits, if you have at least five digits (over $10,000) in your savings account, that is, and he thinks you're being nice. For a $300.00 refund, he can move $30000 from savings to checking and say oops, the decimal point was dropped somehow, and now you were "over-refunded" by $29,700. (The $80,000 job I mentioned a few paragraphs up was one of these. The "refund" was supposed to be $800. The "mistake" made it $80,000. The fake "overpayment" was thus $79,200.)
Well now, of course, he (the scammer) is going to get fired from his job for the refund error even though it wasn’t his fault because it happened once before, too, and now they’re going to blame him. It's his customer (you), so it's his responsibility. His family can’t afford for him to be out of work again because, in his underdeveloped country, tech jobs are hard to find and this is a really good one. The money that just went into your bank account is his employer’s money anyway (not really), and not really yours (yes it is!), and "for security reasons" your bank account isn’t allowed to wire money internationally back to his employer to correct the error, so could you please go to your bank and get a cashier’s check for the amount of his accidental overpayment and mail it to him? You would save the day and his family would be eternally grateful!
They’re so convincing that more than half of victims go to the bank for the cashier's check. (The rest just hang up, turn off their computers, and say oh great, now what do I do? But at least they’re not out thousands of dollars, and now my fees don’t seem so high after all. For context, I’m about the same rate as plumbers.)
This is where the bank tellers come in. They see this scam quite a bit and thus ask what happened before they make out the cashier's check. It’s a common story. Occasionally, the scammer is still on the phone yelling at the victim not to listen to the bank teller because they don’t understand what happened and how much trouble they are in at work.
The bank locks the victim’s accounts, cancels their cards, and gives them my number for a computer cleanup.
The victim’s computer will now need to have the remote access software removed. (I've seen up to three remote access programs installed at a time, and I'm realizing now that this scam must be why TeamViewer recently tightened their restrictions on their free version that they are legally required to offer as a condition of using AT&T's original VNC source code for free. Last fall, 2020, TeamViewer stopped allowing small businesses like mine to use the free version.) The victim's computer will also get a general cleanup and an update: a tuneup, in other words. It’s not uncommon for people to unload their laundry list of other tech issues from around their house on me once I’m there, such as their smart TV won’t stay on line and Netflix constantly buffers (a common Comcast wireless problem) or their iPad won’t download email anymore (a common AT&T security problem) or their grandkids want a stronger wireless signal in the basement (a common wireless extender problem fixed with a mesh network). Whatever. That’s what I’m here for.
(For the above mentioned $79,200 "refund overpayment", a teller at our bank caught it when the lady went in to get a cashier's check. The teller locked the account and had her call me to examine her computer. This was the computer with three remote access programs installed, an especially skilled scammer who felt entitled to a higher fee. There's only one bank in Arnold, CA, so it would be easy to figure out who the heroic teller girls are. They have prevented members of our small mountain community from sending untold thousands of dollars to scammers.)
Since it was Easter week, in a sort of bad-news-good-news story, one of the bank tellers said I owed them chocolate for all the referrals. That's how common this scam is now. She was kidding but I thought it was a good idea. When I went to buy some See’s Nuts and Chews for them at our local grocery store with proceeds going to our local grammar school, I accidentally knocked a second box of Nuts & Chews off of the display stand and onto the floor five feet below. That box's content shifted due to the inevitably abrupt stop at the end of its fall. Now there was a dent in the corner and a bulge in the middle of the second box. It wouldn’t be right for me to give that box to the bank girls nor for me to leave it behind on the store shelf for someone else to pay good money for. So, I bought that damaged box as well and thus we had some spring break chocolates at my house, too. Don’t you just love happy endings?
If you remember anything, remember this: The scammers goal is just to get you on the phone. That's the hard part. Once they've got you on the line, the rest is easy for them.
To avoid it, just don’t call anyone when your computer tells you to even if you're sure that it's just Microsoft, because it isn't. Or, hang up abruptly without even saying goodbye if they call and tell you that your computer has a problem and needs to be looked at. They’ll keep calling you. Just keep ignoring them. If you block their number, they’ll try on another number, and so then just block that number, as well. Two numbers blocked is the most I’ve ever had to do for a client.
If your computer is locked and you’re stuck, call people you know until you get referred to someone local you can trust (you know, such as me!).
For more on this subject, the following article was forwarded by Bob Seiler. The Refund Scam, which is the one I now see the most, is mentioned in Scenario #2 in the boxes toward the end of the article.
AARP Fraud expert Doug Shadel meets a computer hacker who uses his skills to take down fraudsters and expose their schemes.
