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.
