Cyberscam artists are lurking everywhere, and most of us are targeted by them regularly. Just last week, I received an email from someone I didn’t know with a suspicious attachment that included a photo of where I live.
I didn’t open the attachment, but in a preview I could view the image and read the first sentence of a threat: “I know that visiting,” it said, “would be a more effective way to contact in case you don’t cooperate.”
I was rattled for a second, but then I thought about the stories I had been working on for Swindled Savings, a New York Times series on online scams.
With so much technology at our fingertips — not to mention, information mined from data breaches, social media, even Google Maps — it’s easier than ever for scammers to send targeted attacks to thousands of people in an instant, with the intent to scare us, or maybe even romance us, into compliance.
As a personal finance reporter for The Times’s Business desk, I’ve reported on plenty of frauds. But I had never thought too deeply about how online scams were constructed, or who perpetrated them, until I attended a financial crimes conference in the spring of 2023.
At the time, my colleague Ron Lieber and I were writing a series about people who had their bank accounts closed with little explanation. I was at the conference to learn more about how financial institutions sniff out suspicious transactions that help them thwart and report fraud, money laundering, human trafficking and other crimes to regulators — and how sometimes, they get it wrong.
While there, I came across a booth that deconstructed sophisticated schemes that play out over weeks, including romance scams, when a fraudster masquerading as a love interest tries to hoodwink its victim into sending them money. The computer screen showed what types of transactions were fishy enough, from the perspective of the banks, to raise red flags.
I found the illustrations striking. We know that our credit card issuers are supersmart about flagging suspicious transactions. But institutions may be able to determine when customers are being conned by a phony Romeo? I was intrigued, so I jotted the topic down on my story list.
That was a germ of an idea that led me down the path of online scams. Months later, two Times editors, Mike Dang and Deborah Solomon, flagged a report about elder financial exploitation, which analyzed the types of online schemes that were circulating. I revisited my story idea list.
To start, I asked regular readers of the Your Money newsletter if they or someone they knew had recently been victimized. I was floored by the number of horrifying tales that soon landed in my inbox.
There was a couple who lost more than a million dollars to bank impostors, which was the first truly eye-popping figure I had come across. There were dozens of other victims.
And then there was Barry Heitin, a former lawyer whose story was especially jarring, but also cinematic.
His daughter had shared the impersonation scheme he had become entangled in, which cost him roughly $740,000. For nearly three months, he was in daily contact with fraudsters who pretended to be bank and government officials. They created a sense of urgency, convincing him he could help stop criminals from breaking into his bank accounts and the accounts of others.
After the article was published, I heard from more victims. Many had lost their savings, including a musician who lost $9,000 and an educator who lost $900,000. I continue to be astounded by the number of victims who are still contacting me.
As I was collecting the details from scam victims, I was also speaking with industry sources. That’s when I learned about an entirely different set of victims: some of the scammers themselves, who are often trafficked to Southeast Asia.
These victims are often working under the threat of physical punishment, and many of the operations are run by organized crime groups. I thought it would be illuminating to juxtapose one type of victim against the other, to help illustrate just how large this global scamming enterprise has grown.
I figured I would have a hard time locating people forced into becoming scammers, but then I remembered someone I had met who had expertise in human trafficking. His group connected me with another, which led me to Jalil Muyeke, a 32-year-old from Uganda, who is the focus of my most recent article in the series.
He went to Thailand for what he thought was a job opportunity — and ended up being trafficked into a cybercrime operation. I spoke with him for hours about his ordeal, which I knew couldn’t have been easy for him.
There are many angles that I continue to explore, from the devastating tax implications of scams to how fraudsters get inside of our heads, and why some victims are unwilling to let their scammers — and the characters they slip into — go.
As for me, this reporting has put me on even higher alert for all-things potentially sketchy, and I hope it does the same for readers. Since filing this essay, I’ve received three more threatening emails with photos of my home, demanding $2,000 in Bitcoin in exchange for keeping my web browsing habits a secret.
I didn’t pay up, and my Target browsing history is still safe.
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