We had just come home from cleaning out my father-in-law’s nursing home room and were exhausted, both physically and emotionally. Checking my phone there was a message from PayPal informing me that a person was attempting to extract $985.00 from our account. Being the savvy consumer that I am, I did not click on the link but instead googled the PayPal website. Normally, the sites I use frequently, I bookmark, but I failed to bookmark PayPal. Slightly panicked and not in a good place to begin with, I clicked on the first site that came up and dialed the number.
Upon reaching ‘customer service,’ the guy says that he must kick the issue to the fraud alert department and to hold while they transferred my call. The fraud alert folks in turn tell me that they can only resolve the issue through their IT department. This is when the alarm bells start going off, but I was not thinking clearly to begin with. A third person gets on the line and tells me that he needs to remote into my computer to remove the charge. At this point I am extremely skeptical, but I keep thinking I am on the phone with PayPal. So, I allow the guy to remote into my computer which I am sure I do not have to tell you……………………should never, ever do.
Now this honest and upstanding gentleman has access to my computer. He then tells me that they can only refund $300 of the $985.00 back to me in one day and suddenly a black box appears on my screen, and he instructs me to type in $300.00. I entered $300.00 but it appears as $3,000.00. Now the guy is yelling at me, asking why I typed in $3,000.00 and not $300.00. I tell him I typed in $300,00 but he tells me that I am lying and to prove it asks me to look at my banking statement and sure enough a deposit of $3,000.00 appears in our checking account. He then accuses me of being a thief. This in sports vernacular is throwing your opponent off his game.
It is at this point that I lose it. Now we are screaming at each other and the next thing he says is “My manager was listening in and because of my profanity, they are going to take all my money from our bank account. As I am staring at the bank screen, I watch in horror as all the numbers go to zero with a black header at the top of my statement that reads; “In Violation of Federal Banking laws.” He now tells me that to return the money into my account, I need to go to the nearest store that sells gift cards and purchase six $500.00 American Express gift cards. I ask him why not just take the $3,000.00 out of my checking account to which he replies that the bank that they deal with “is closed for the day” and the $3,000.00 must be returned tonight.
If you have ever watched before your eyes your money disappear from your computer screen, you have yet to live. He then tells me from halfway around the world that there is a CVS less than a mile from my house. I told him I can only afford to buy a $1,000.00 in gift cards reasoning that he was only going to get me a third of the original $985.00 that they took in the first place. After a prolonged period of silence, he agrees.
Even though it has dawned on me that I am not dealing with PayPal, he has access to my banking information. So, in a torrential rainstorm, I got in the car, ready to give this guy the two gift cards to get our money back. As I am driving, I know I am being a victim of a scam but do not know how to get out of it. As I was about to walk into CVS, the guy told me not to bring my phone in the store, to leave it in the car, turned on and return with the gift cards. We argued about bringing the phone into the store and he tells me if anyone other than me gets on the phone, I will never see my money again. At the cashier is a nice young woman, I tell her the whole sordid story. She has heard this story before and says, “sir don’t do it.”
As I was leaving the store I remembered reading about how scammers can clone documents such as bank statements and I decided to take a calculated risk that this is what they did and in fact, the money never left our account. I got back in the car and announced to the phone on my front seat that I have returned. The guy says good and tells me to read the numbers on each of the gift cards. This is when my New Jersey kicks in and I asked him if he was ready with a pen and paper. He is. Slowly, I enunciate a word that begins with an F and ends with a K followed by the word Off and tell him I am sitting in the police department parking lot and am about to go in and file a police report and hang up. He calls me back a dozen times, but I do not pick up. Arriving home, I unplugged my computer, reset it back to its factory settings and then log back into my bank and sure enough all the numbers are back and surprise, the $3,000.00 is no longer there. The next day, I went to the bank, changed the account numbers, and closed out our PayPal account.
At the bank I am told thar this gift card fraud is common, and people have lost millions to these scammers. As a public service announcement and for people like me whose elevator sometimes gets stuck before reaching the top floor, here is how to not experience the nightmare that I did. If you deal with a company on a regular basis and you engage in any kind of exchange of money or services, bookmark that site and make sure it is the “official” site. Because I had not bookmarked PayPal, I called the first PayPal site that came up on the google search. It was a fraudulent site. Never, ever let anyone remote into your computer unless you are 100% sure that they are legit. From time-to-time, change your user identifications and passwords, especially with your bank. If you do get hacked, file a police report and a complaint to the Better Business Bureau. And if you ever hear the word gift card, hang up the phone as quickly as humanly possible.
Happy surfing.
