Thank You, Officer Roy
So I have a story. I was teaching a class and I got a phone call, my phone was on silent but they left a message. While the students were doing a quick writing thing, I listened to the voicemail. It was an automated message from Social Security. The robotic woman’s voice said they needed to speak to me immediately.
So while I was driving away from class I called them back. The first sign should have been that someone answered the phone instead of an automated machine. Secondly, he sounded a little frazzled when he answered and he had an Indian accent.
I thought maybe Social Security, the government, was outsourcing to India. Ok fine. He tells me there is a legal hold on my Social Security account, that someone has stolen my number and is using it fraudulently.
I believe him. Like an idiot.
He then goes on to say that they found a rental car on the side of the road in Texas rented under my name, that had forty- thousand dollars cash and some amount of kilos of cocaine.
I’m still believing him and I’m in shock. It doesn’t occur to me that you don’t rent a car with your Social Security number, you rent it with your credit card. But nevermind...
Then he asks me if I will cooperate with the government in finding the culprit. I say yes. He then tells me his name is Officer Roy. That’s when I lost it. Officer Roy? A police officer was calling me from Social Security, a police officer with an Indian accent?
I said to him, this is a scam, isn’t it? He denied it and told me to pull over the car and go on the Internet so he could verify his identity. I hung up. He called me again and again and I never picked up.
The problem is not Officer Roy, Officer Roy would not be in business if people like me were not actually taking his calls and listening with interest to his tall tales. I actually believed him when he said that he found a car on the side of the road in Texas with forty-thousand dollars cash and kilos and kilos of cocaine. I’m repeating this to point out the obvious insanity of it. The insanity is not, however, in those who do this for a living. They are smart, in fact, they are horrible people but very intelligent. It’s me, I’m the problem.
I’m not an eighty-year-old woman suffering from the first stages of dementia and not sure what is real and what is not. If they can con educated and ‘worldly’ people like myself, anyone is at risk of falling for this bullshit.
So what to do? Be smarter? OK. I mean there were red flags from the very beginning here, and I should have picked up on them right away. My parents in fact have been called by the ‘IRS,’ again with men with Indian accents asking them to wire two-thousand dollars or be put in jail. At first, my parents entertained these men who called, because someone who says they are an authority can really be convincing. The sad part is that they target old people and immigrants, people who may not fully comprehend how the system works and scare them. But if you are wiring two-thousand dollars to anyone without a written statement of some sort, perhaps you are part of the problem.
Unfortunately, we have to be smarter than these fools, or we will end up being the fool. This is not someone hacking into your bank account, this is someone hacking into your brain. Making you trust them. I can’t really explain why I spent fifteen minutes of my life listening to Officer Roy, fifteen minutes I will never get back. I can’t explain why I almost gave him my Social Security number over the phone. Yes, I said it. I was ready to give it to him.
This makes me beyond stupid. It makes me dangerous. To myself. After I suspected it was a scam I asked Officer Roy if he knew my Social Security number, and he did. Which still kind of scares me. All he needed with that was my driver’s license number and a credit card, and we would have had a rental car in the middle of Texas with cash and kilos of cocaine.
There are people around the world spending enormous amounts of money, resources and time into the scamming business. It is in fact a career for these people, and it must be lucrative or they wouldn’t be doing it. Someone is giving these assholes money.
Don’t be the asshole who does that.
And if you know of someone who seems vulnerable, educate them about the possibilities of fraud. Sometimes these people threaten people’s immigration status, we have to have more public education on this matter. I’ve heard of scams where people say they have kidnapped someone’s child etc. There is nothing or no limit to how low they will go.
We need to spread the word. Especially to those who are most vulnerable.
My immigrant elderly parents are just those people. I have told them to not even entertain someone from the government over the phone, everything the government does must be in writing for it to be considered legal. Especially asking for money.
No-one legitimate will ask you for money over the phone. My friend told me about one of those scams where they email you and tell you to buy a bunch of gift cards or something for your company. A man in my friend’s company had just been hired and he bought hundreds of dollars of gift cards with company money.
He was educated and smart. He lost his job.
No one is going to ask you for money via email either, most likely.
The truth is that I am soon going to become an elderly daughter of immigrants. The truth is they may find a way to dupe me for real next time. I guess I just have to be vigilant and be on alert, especially when handing anyone personal information or money.
We are the only ones who can protect ourselves from these monsters and they will get smarter. We have to be one step ahead of them.
nina