According to statistics from the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI), there are more than 750,000 complaints received each year from those who have fallen victim to a scammer. In 2023, scammers caused people to lose $12.5 billion, and this is happening everywhere. Even here in Patrick County.
“Honestly, I think the mentality is, I’m not a victim. It’s not going to happen to me. People need to realize this can happen in Patrick County,” Patrick County Sheriff Lt. Steve Austin said.
The reality is that even recently, a resident lost nearly $2,000 to scammers. The scam required the resident to buy gift cards to receive something of greater value. While that might seem suspicious to some, there is more to the story.
A Facebook friend endorsed the plan, validating everything the scammer had said – including the results. What the resident didn’t know was that their friend’s Facebook profile had been compromised, and the individual endorsing the scam was not a long-time friend, but an accomplice in the scam.
Believing the ‘friend’s’ validation, the person followed the instructions, purchasing gift cards totaling the desired amount. The instant the card numbers were delivered to the scammer, the money was gone, with no way to trace it.
And there are more stories like this as scams become a bigger problem locally.
“Scamming in general, aside from drug crimes, currently, is the number one issue that we have. It could be corporate, and it could be private individuals. The problem is it’s the least likely to be solved,” said Patrick County Sheriff Capt. Eric O’Connell. The transition in the last 10 years has been from “common B-and-E (breaking and entering) type crimes in general investigations to a lot more white-collar type of crimes. Specifically, scams.”
For those falling prey to scammers, the disappointment of having lost their money is compounded because bringing the guilty to justice is unlikely to happen. But that’s not for a lack of trying.
“A lot of these cases do go unsolved, and I think sometimes it can be misunderstood that it’s due to our lack of experience or various reasons,” said O’Connell. “Truth be known, it’s because they’re almost untouchable,” because the scammer often is located overseas.
“These things are very hard to solve and it’s not because we can’t or don’t want to. We’d love to” bring them to justice, O’Connell said.
Scammers know their location makes them nearly impossible to find, which makes what they do low risk, with potentially high payoffs.
“That’s why we want to prevent this before it happens, because we know the majority of the time what the outcome is going to be,” Austin said. “It’s very unfortunate. Some people lose their life savings. I cannot imagine how violated they would feel,” after losing their money.
Preventing scams starts with understanding how well trained many scammers are in their trade. Many used to work in legitimate call centers, helping people with tech issues. This experience gives them deep knowledge of how operating systems work, and they can use that knowledge to scam people through their computers, authorities said.
Additionally, they have received training and gained expertise in handling potential victims. “They have scripts. They know what’s successful. They know how to read the scripts. They use your empathy against you,” said Investigator Jason Kruse.
The scammers also have high-tech assets at their disposal. Many of their call centers can make “thousands of calls a minute, for hundreds of thousands of calls a day. They have got a system that they know works,” said O’Connell. “These people have the experience, the technology, the knowledge, and they’re so successful. Financially, they’re making lots of money. I would hate to know how much money they’re making. They’re professionals at being a scammer.”
Even if the number on caller ID is from your area, it is easy for a scammer to ‘spoof’ their number, which is making it appear to be coming from nearby, while the caller could be on the other side of the world.
If you answer the call and a scammer is on the other end, the scammer will go into their pitch, authorities said.
Besides spoofing their numbers, scammers can imitate entities like the IRS, Social Security, your doctor and your health insurance company.
For scammers pretending to be from a government agency, particularly the IRS, the Patrick County Sheriff’s office says to treat these calls as a scam. The IRS will not contact you over the phone. Rather, they contact people through the mail, often by certified mail. The Sheriff’s office advises people to hang up and call them with the number that called, even though the caller claims to be from the IRS or other agency. They can check the number and find out if it’s legitimate or not. Most times, it will not.
If the scammer is claiming to be from your doctor or insurance company, saying you owe money, be very careful. According to Kruse, if it’s a scammer, “they won’t ask for your banking information. They will ask you to go get something a little harder to trace. Almost untraceable, like some type of prepaid card or cash, and mail it to them. A lot of times it’s the card. That card can go across the world.” Again, once overseas, the money is lost.
Scammers can, and will, pretend to be any business they think can make them money. O’Connell said to be weary “if there is any discussion of money at all. Something owed now, back pay, overdraft fee, various things like that. Have no contact with that person. If you have an account with a rental place or bank, go to them in person, if you can’t physically, call them on the number that you know and have conducted business with them in the past.”
By directly contacting the business the scammer is claiming to be, you can verify if the debt is legitimate or a scammer hoping for a payday. Again, keep in mind that legitimate businesses will not conduct business in the way scammers will want you to. They will accept forms of payment that can be traced, for your benefit and their own. They will not want untraceable payment methods, such as gift cards.
Computer Scams
Criminals don’t limit their scams to the telephone. Computer scams are equally prevalent. Phone or computer, many red flags are the same, including the use of gift cards or cryptocurrency as payment methods.
If you don’t know who the email is from, don’t open it. Should you open it, do not reply and absolutely, do not click any links in the email. “Any email that somebody wants you to click on a link, just treat it as a scam,” said Austin.
Online scams come in some very different forms. Like phone scams, they can spoof an incoming email address, even making it look like the email is coming from your own email address.
The criminals may even use extortion to get people to send them money. Victims of this type of online crime are often men who fall prey to female scammers, or at least pretending to be female. Sometimes, the victim will send a photo, sometimes explicit. The scammer will extort them by threatening to post the photo publicly unless the victim pays up.
“It’s one of the types that is not as well-known publicly, because there’s so much shame involved in that. But it’s very common,” said O’Connell. “A lot of the time it’s not an astronomical amount of money.” Other scams often involve dollar amounts into the tens of thousands of dollars. “These we see $300, or $500.”
These crimes are not exclusive to men.
Kruse said there was “an 18-year-old female who thought she found a sugar daddy and was going to scam the guy. It turns out he was scamming her. He got access to her checking account and the bank that she banks with does not have the best online security, and he was able to see some transactions that she had. He was able to get photocopies of some checks of other people, wash (clear) them and cash them again through her bank, then send the money into his account. She was being scammed when she was trying to scam someone else.”
In that case, Kruse said the man convinced the woman “that he needs to use her bank account information to send the money directly into her bank account. Well, she gives him the password and everything to her banking app, then immediately goes in and finds out that she’s got some checks floating around.”
There are scammers everywhere online, and like the phone scams, they are most often overseas, making any recovery of money lost nearly impossible. This is why prevention is the key.
By pretending to be some sort of tech support, scammers can use programs to gain access to your computer under the guise of fixing it. Once in your computer, they can scam you in several ways.
They can make it look as though you paid them money that they need to refund to you. In the refund process, some scammers can make it appear that rather than a $300 refund they’re trying to send, they ‘accidentally’ refunded $3,000 or $30,000. Playing on your emotions, they will create a sense of urgency by telling you they are going to lose their job over the mistake unless quickly fixed. No money was refunded, but in the process of trying to help, many will give the scammer their bank account information, which was the scammer’s goal all along. Once they get into your bank account, you are in real trouble.
Never give out any of your banking or financial information to anyone online. While this may seem like an obvious statement, online scammers, like phone scammers, know what they are doing and how to convince you to give them the information they need to complete the scam.
Another scam seen locally is, “they will send you a check and ask you to cash it. Keep $500 for yourself,” said Austin. The victim cashes the check, sends the scammer the money, and unwittingly becomes a suspect in the crime.
“Not only that, but they could overdraft their checking account, and become a criminal – not necessarily by intent, but by a pattern of writing bad checks,” not knowing their account is overdrawn, said O’Connell.
A central message authorities hope to convey is that they are there to help, and want to do so. While there may be little they can do after someone has been scammed, they have plenty of options to help prevent it beforehand.
“Before anybody does anything with these things (potential scams) call law enforcement. Our motto is we would rather be bothered at one a.m. than have to do the work at nine a.m. If you’re suspicious, call us,” said O’Connell.
By calling the instant you suspect something isn’t right with an incoming call or email, investigators can go to work to find out the legitimacy of the email or call before you fall prey to a scam.
“It’s a really bad thing that has gotten worse and worse. and I can only think how much more intelligent these computer specialists become. It’s going to get harder and harder to detect,” said O’Connell.
Understanding that scams can happen to anyone may help overcome the stigma, because authorities said, scams can happen to anyone – even a law enforcement officer.
“There was an investigator. We were in the same office,” Austin said. “My phone rings, and it’s his number. And we’re in the office together, and it’s somebody else trying to sell me something.”
The caller was spoofing the other investigator’s number, Austin said, adding “nobody’s immune.”
