Scammers bring Stockholm syndrome in new long cons

Online scamming has become increasingly sophisticated and people are getting burned based on AI replication, document forgeries and long con scams designed to empty their bank accounts.

Online scamming has become increasingly sophisticated and people are getting burned based on AI replication, document forgeries and long con scams designed to empty their bank accounts.

The old scams often featuring Indian call centres are still about. Rarely a day goes by without me receiving a dodgy text, with an even dodgier URL, claiming to be from Australia Post informing me that a parcel could not be delivered.

Most people like myself will look at the text and the skull-and-crossbones link, block the number and delete the text. But those perhaps expecting a delivery or who find themselves in a moment of weakness, will click the link and make the contact.

I know of one person who did. The way the con plays out is that the scammer tells the mark there is insufficient postage on the item and requests payment. It might be a matter of a few dollars but that’s not where it ends. A four hour telephone call later and the mark, in this case an elderly woman, handed over access to her laptop and internet banking and lost $25000.

There are more advanced long cons in play now and anyone is potentially vulnerable.

This week’s New York Magazine features a painful story of one of their freelance journalists being duped into handing over her life savings in a shoebox through the window of a vehicle parked outside her apartment never to see it again.

The freelancer writes financial advice columns for one of New York Magazine’s imprints, The Cut. The con involved a story that she was about to have her assets seized by the CIA after a scammer told her that she had been the subject of identity theft by a drug cartel. It sounds widely improbable and does not speak highly of her role as a financial adviser. But she became immersed in the con, reality and fantasy became entwined and at the end of the day, she was $US50,000 poorer.

A relative of mine has been the subject of a long scam. He first informed me of it six months ago. I was immediately sceptical and told him, don’t provide access to any personal details, especially bank account numbers and never allow remote access to his computer.

They lured him in with the promise of a payment by way of reimbursement for an investment they claimed he had made many years earlier. He hadn’t, I presume, lost any money at all but the scammers waved a large sum of money his way, and he fell for the trap of easy money.

The details he provided me were initially sketchy. Like most marks, he had been warned that divulging the deal to any third party would render it invalid and that he would be subject to prosecution for money laundering.

Eventually he sent me some documents from the scammers. The first contact purportedly came from the Financial Conduct Authority, the UK’s prudential watchdog.

At first glance, the document looked genuine. It bore the FCA logo and London contact details. The letter was signed by an employee of the FCA. A check of the regulator’s website listed the employee. The scam involved the FCA returning funds they claimed my relative had invested years earlier and had subsequently been used in a money laundering exercise. The FCA had seized the funds and was now returning them to their original owners. A sum of $US35,000 and change was mentioned.

There were a lot of red flags already. Why would a UK regulator reimburse in green backs? The answer to that raises even more red flags. The figure assessed in US dollars would be repaid in Bitcoin. Once the bitcoin payment was made, the FCA would extract its own fees of $US7000.

On closer inspection the letter from the FCA was a forgery. The regulator’s logo in all other public correspondence ran on the right hand side but the logo appeared on the left hand side. There was no reference number or code cited on the letter as government agencies and private companies.

There were other documents, including one from a finance company in Amsterdam. While the original letter was written in formal language, the Amsterdam correspondence contained awkward greetings, misspellings and punctuation errors. These letters were also becoming increasingly shrill, again warning my relative not to share any information with any third party and insisting that if he did not act, the deal was off and the money would no longer be available to him.

Rather than reject it all as nonsense, my relative came to a belief that the original letter and offer was genuine and that somehow it had fallen into the hands of scammers. He was on the hook. I told him how it would end with his bank account drained of funds but he pressed on.

I contacted the FCA who confirmed that the letter was a forgery. They sent an email to my relative and said the same. But even then he wasn’t sure. He rang me with some more information, there had been more late night phone calls and more demands.

“The letter is a forgery. There is no money. Never has been, never will be,” I told him.

Greed obviously is a factor in some of these outrageous cons. But not always. How is it that seemingly intelligent people get taken to the cleaners in ways that beggar belief? A feature of a lot of rackets, is that the mark will often say afterwards they knew or suspected they were being conned but went ahead anyway, often driven by emotional exhaustion after long telephone calls and increasing threats.

There’s a deep psychology in play where scammers isolate their marks and create an alternate reality. Once the mark is in the bubble, often cautioned or threatened not to divulge the scams to any other person lest some terrible fate befall them, the scammers flick the switch. Calls can go back and forth for days on end. The so-called Stockholm syndrome is a myth but some elements of it are in play. Once a mark is on the hook it’s hard to wriggle off.

My relative still receives calls and more demands. I told him to contact Telstra and get a temporary block on international calls. Save that, tell them to go to buggery and put the phone down. He demurred. He’s still on the hook.