On Monday Dan and I read this article in the NY Times that relayed the story of a horrible scam that a retired attorney had fallen for. Here's the article and I hope you can read it for free.
Here's some of the article
For nearly three months, Barry Heitin, a 76-year-old retired lawyer, thought he was part of a government investigation that felt like something out of the movies. He was actually assisting criminals in stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars — of his own money.
Last fall, he spent just about every weekday doing the legwork and making withdrawals from his bank accounts as part of an intricate scam: He believed he was helping the feds safeguard his money and catch thieves who were after it.
“They kept telling me, ‘This is a big case and we are going to stop a whole ring of people,’” Mr. Heitin said. “It was like a rabbit hole. I was going down the hole with them.”
It cost him almost all of his retirement savings: roughly $740,000.
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Dan and I came away from this vowing never to open up pop up screens, always going to the source using telephone numbers we had and not those suggested in an email or pop-up, and most importantly having a Trusted Contact attached to our accounts. A Trusted Contact will be contacted if suspicious withdrawals appear on our accounts. It should be someone younger than yourself so we selected our oldest daughter.
We got right on the phone to add a Trusted Contact to our retirement and savings accounts. We have all those with one big firm and we accomplished that task. We approached our bank, too but they don't provide that ability and assured us that their fraud department has in place protections that should work like the trusted contact.
As we age we know our ability to judge situations will change. We already get strange requests through emails and iMessages that we know to ignore. We don't answer calls that don't identify the caller. And we ignore any pop ups. But scammers are getting smarter and we're getting older. I can only hope we'll stay ahead of them.
8 comments:
Any measures you can take to protect yourself are a good idea. I have even read of respected financial journalists being taken in by scammers and, here in the UK, there has been a new scam featured in the news this week. Fraudsters are setting up fake online tribute pages for the recently deceased and inviting their friends and acquaintances to watch their funeral online for a fee. But watching funerals online doesn't require a fee and anyone giving their bank or card details is giving them straight to the scammers. They are despicable.
Good ideas that you're setting up your own insurance system. I have little in my accounts, nor much under the mattress, but I get by just fine. Knock on wood. I am glad my phone says "possible spam" for so many calls. It's easy enough if they are a legitimate company to leave a voice mail.
...what law school did Barry Heitin attend?
I was a fraud target, again, at one of my banks just this week. Someone tried to book a nice vacation for themselves using my online bank account. Sadly for them, I keep very little money in that account! But the bank caught the unusual charge from a distant location. I had to be on the phone for a half hour while the fraud people went through their routine.
The thing is, I have no debit card for this account because it was hacked just a few months ago. My other bank, I never have had an issue, and I have been with them for 50 years.
So this second bank? I will close that account because their security seems pretty loose. I only use it for ebay anyway, so I will have to contact ebay and get my seller account set up to use a different bank.
Thank you for this. We need to do the same.
It’s hard t believe that people can fall for these scams. I’d put it down to age, but I am that old.
Yikes! How scary. Thaks for the warning.
Poor man what a horrible thing to happen.
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