This is an conversation from Apple News. Today, how a financial columnist got scammed out of $50,000 and ways to prevent that from happening to you.

Hi there, I'm Julia Carpenter.

For the next month, I'm going to be sitting in for Shimita while she's out on maternity leave.

For a lot of my career I've covered stories about money and personal finance.

Most recently I worked at the Wall Street Journal,

and a few months ago, my first book,

The New Rules of Money hit bookshelves.

So that's what I'm going to be diving into

for the next few weeks on this show.

All things personal finance and the different

ways money impacts our lives. And for the first episode, we're talking about scams.

Last year on Halloween around 12.30 p.m. Charlotte Kohl's got a call.

My caller ID said Amazon.

Charlotte answered it and at least at first it seemed like a standard customer service call.

The woman who claimed to be from Amazon customer service was very professional.

She was saying like this call is being recorded for quality assurances.

How are you doing today? We have this information about your account that we

flagged and wanted to confirm this activity. It seemed like unusual activity.

The woman asked Charlotte if she had recently spent $8,000

on various electronics like Macbooks and iPads.

Charlotte said she hadn't, and when Charlotte checked her account there was no sign of these purchases.

And she said, oh, it was under your business account and I don't have a business account on Amazon.

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