(Based
on an article in the Toronto Sun, July 2009)
It
happens to people all the time during economic recessions, to those who are the
most financially vulnerable. They become
the victims of scammers. Why? Because “easy offers” of money, whether they
be via online, phone or mail by scammers are just as effective in modern
recessionary times as they were in older times.
When people become desperate for money, scammers somehow know how to
attract these people to bogus money schemes that imply that little or no work
will be required in order to obtain a large amount of cash. But, it’s actually a lot like a lottery –
many people paying for tickets that usually will not be winners. And, whoever is collecting the proceeds of
the ticket sales is the grand winner.
The prize for the payee is not “the pot of gold at the end of the
rainbow”, but ends up being a very small or non-existent prize. One of the most famous examples of a scam is
the “Nigerian letter” scam, which “promises untold millions from an African
country in exchange for some help with a few bank transactions”.
A
clever scam happened very recently to a friend of mine whose name is
Bobbie. She had been doing some research
on the Internet for an online job that she could do at home to make some extra
money. She found a job ad that promised
10% of the proceeds, just for depositing some foreign money orders into her
bank for an unknown person, ostensibly an investor of some sort. I told her that I thought it might be a
money-laundering operation, done by funnelling money through various bank
accounts. The innocent people being
asked to deposit foreign money orders would not be told why they were being
asked to do this and, therefore, would not know that they were actually
handling “dirty money”.
As
it turned out, the two foreign money orders that Bobbie took to her bank to
deposit could not be negotiated. For
some reason unknown to us, her bank would not accept these foreign money orders
for deposit. I thought that this was
very strange, since banks everywhere deal with all kinds of foreign currencies
every day. It made me think that the
bank was already aware of such money-laundering schemes and had created a
policy stating that they had to be avoided.
Bobbie
then wrote a short letter to the person who had sent her the foreign money
orders to be deposited. The reply she
received back from him was shocking.
This so-called “investor” had been scammed himself. His identity had been stolen and the two
foreign money orders had been faked by someone else and were thus, bogus. How Bobbie, herself, was able to avoid
getting into trouble with the law over this, or lose a lot of her own money
ultimately was, in my opinion, an incredible stroke of luck.
Statistics,
in fact, show that “an average of 10 Canadians per month get soaked for as much
as hundreds of thousands of dollars.” The usual method is via email. One RCMP officer who works on exposing these
scams says, “I’ve been with the RCMP for 21 years and I’m still looking at the
same email messages and they still work.
But, letter scams are just a drop in the bucket compared to losses from
identity theft and mass marketing fraud, including bogus offers from investment
opportunities, [fraudulent] prizes and lottery winnings, and [bogus] insurance
claims. Due to identity theft alone, as
of June 30 of this year (2009), 6,700 complained that they had lost about $5.2
million. And, last year (2008), more
than 11,000 reported more than $9.6 million in losses.”
I,
myself, was a potential victim of identity theft last year. One day, I lost my driver’s license on a TTC
bus while riding the bus to work. But, I
didn’t think too much about it until, one day, I received a phone call from a
branch manager of my bank, a manager with whom I had never dealt or ever met before
(because I didn’t deal with his branch).
After identifying himself to me, this manager told me that, recently, an
unknown woman of about my age had come into his branch and had requested access
to my bank accounts. All she had with
her was my driver’s license, which she presented as her own ID; however, she had
no bank access card or password. When
she was requested to produce a valid bank access card and password, she then
turned around and fled the bank in a hurry, leaving my driver’s license behind.
At
the time of this incident, the branch manager was informed by the teller who
had dealt with the woman about this unknown woman and her actions. However, he was not sure of exactly whose
driver’s license he now had in his possession.
After some searching, he was finally able to locate my unlisted home
phone number in the bank’s customer database records and call me to verify if,
in fact, it was my driver’s license that he had. I had already gotten a replacement driver’s
license, but he said that he still needed to know if the one he had now was
also mine. He asked for the expiry date
on my current (replacement) driver’s license that I had just obtained and it
matched the expiry date of the one in his possession. It was clear that they both belonged to
me. He then told me the whole story of
how he had come to be in possession of my lost driver’s license.
This
branch manager then advised me to obtain a new bank access card as soon as
possible from any branch, and to change my PIN while there so that no one else
could try to access my bank accounts again.
I told him that I would do as he asked, plus I asked him, in the
meantime, to post a system message on my bank account (online) that
anyone trying to access my bank accounts had to produce satisfactory
identification and a valid bank access card first before being allowed to
conduct any bank business. All personnel
in all bank branches would be able to see this system message on my account on
their computers and would thus be able to prevent unauthorized access to my
accounts.
Obviously,
my own ability to replace my lost driver’s license did not prevent someone else
from using my lost driver’s license to try to gain unauthorized access to my
bank accounts. The only thing that had
prevented the strange woman’s unauthorized access was the bank’s requirement to
scan a valid bank access card at the teller’s station and enter a valid
password. When this requirement was
fulfilled, the teller would then know that the customer he/she was dealing with
was actually me, a legitimate customer of the bank, no matter what branch I was
at or where my accounts were physically located.
I
had also heard of other strangers’ attempts to try to gain access to various
people’s computer accounts, at work or at home.
These are not people’s bank accounts, but they do contain the user’s
private files and information. These
attempts usually involve bogus email messages, ostensibly from the network
administrator, stating that there is a problem with the computer user’s
account, and that this problem can only be resolved if the person provides the
network administrator with his/her username and password via email. This very thing happened to me and some of
my fellow colleagues at work, but we were advised by our employer to always
delete this kind of email message and never to reply with any such private
information, either via email or in person.
In fact, we were specifically told that no one should ever share their
username and password with anyone else, no matter who that person is.
My
bank, these days, is very conscious of identity theft and its drastic
consequences, including all suspicious, possibly bogus bank transactions. All banks work hard to prevent unauthorized
access to their customers’ bank accounts, which still can happen via a very
subtle way of recording people’s debit card numbers and passwords, as well as
their credit card numbers. The recording
of this very personal private data happens at the point of purchase with a
vendor (at an ATM machine, for example).
The thieves then use these numbers to make duplicate cards to be used by
scam artists for the purpose of obtaining funds from people’s bank accounts
illegally. Because of the Internet and
other electronic means, it has become easier than ever for thieves to access
people’s personal and financial information illegally. Once it is in the hands of unscrupulous
people, this private information can be used in some very dangerous and
unpredictable ways to hurt innocent and vulnerable people.
There’s
really only one way to deal with scam artists and thieves. You, the customer, must learn to think the way
the perpetrators think so that you can protect your own personal assets and
private information and thus, prevent the kind of catastrophe that is possible
in this Information Age.
published by Authorhouse, copyright 2011, Anne Shier. All rights reserved.
No comments:
Post a Comment