So you've been scammed, now what?

Planet Money

NPR

News, Business

4.6 • 30.5K Ratings

🗓️ 29 May 2024

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We are living in a kind of golden age for online fraudsters. As the number of apps and services for storing and sending money has exploded – so too have the schemes that bad actors have cooked up to steal that money. Every year, we hear more and more stories of financial heartbreak. What you don't often hear about is what happens after the scam?

On today's show, we follow one woman who was scammed out of over $800,000 on her quest to get her money back. That journey takes her from the halls of the FBI to the fraud departments of some of the country's biggest financial institutions. And it offers a window into how the systems that are theoretically designed to help the victims of financial cybercrime actually work in practice.

This episode was hosted by Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi and Jeff Guo. It was produced by Willa Rubin and edited by Keith Romer. It was engineered by Neal Rauch and fact-checked by Sierra Juarez. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money's executive producer.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	With MPR Plus, there's more to hear, like extended interviews with some of the experts we talk to at planet money and the indicator.
0:07.2	It's a mistake for economists to only think about economic efficiency when considering policies because you'll actually
0:13.8	wind up with a worse outcome. And with NPR Plus you help keep NPR going. Learn
0:18.4	more at plus. nPR.org. A heads up before we start today's episode includes a few swear words in the second half and
0:26.3	full disclosure we reference Citibank, Apple and Amazon in the story they They're all NPR sponsors.
0:33.0	This is Planet Money from NPR.
0:36.0	When you talk to Francis about how she got lured into the scam that's taken over her life for the last year.
0:45.2	She says the exact details are a bit of a blur.
0:48.6	It starts with a voicemail, but I was also really sick around that week, so don't think I it just gets fuzzy on how I like got into it.
0:57.7	Francis is a white collar worker in her 40s lives in New York and we're only going to use her first name to protect her professional
1:04.8	reputation.
1:05.8	Now, she says what is clear is that last May, she got this voicemail claiming to be from
1:11.5	Citibank, flagging this suspicious outgoing wire for $50,000.
1:17.0	Shortly thereafter...
1:18.0	I get a text saying, oh, this is David from the security department.
1:22.0	And I'm like, the security department and I'm like the security department for a city because of the wire
1:26.7	When she gets this guy David Smith on the phone he explains that the suspicious wire it might be part of a bigger attack on her whole network of accounts.
1:36.5	He asked her to check her Apple account, for example.
1:39.5	And I do see these extraneous, like these extra charges that are hidden charges on the
1:43.9	Apple account. Pretty soon she's actually getting locked out of her accounts.
1:47.6	Everything just seems like chaos not only like the Citibank wire that's one thing. Then you see my Amazon account is frozen, my
1:55.2	Apple account, everything's kind of frozen. And I'm like, whoa, what the hell?
	...

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