A text from an attractive man or woman, offering romance or an investment opportunity. A threatening phone call saying you’ve missed jury duty, or that there’s a warrant out for your arrest. An AI-generated voice message that sounds like your grandchild, saying they’re in trouble and desperately need money.
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Read moreThe hooks for financial scams are as varied as human psychology. “The psychological techniques that are used to manipulate prospective victims have been in place for a long time,” said Jonathan Rusch, a professor at Georgetown and a former federal prosecutor in the Fraud Section of the U.S. Department of Justice’s Criminal Division.
But behind all of them is one thing: a global, increasingly organized industry that is constantly evolving, and constantly adapting its tricks for hoodwinking innocent people. Likely as not, the police officer or the enticing love prospect are actually one of hundreds or thousands of workers in a massive compound abroad, far beyond the reach of U.S. law enforcement. They may be texting tens of people a day. They may have profiled you using your social media, and made a guess on how best to lure you in.
What they want next is for you to stay on the phone, said Sgt. Stephen Kimberly in the Denver Police Department’s Fraud Unit, beyond the reach of family or support networks that might give you a second opinion. Their aim is to extract as much money as they possibly can — even pushing some victims to take out a second mortgage, or put themselves in “deep financial jeopardy,” Rusch said.
Take cash from one ATM and put it into a crypto ATM
Oftentimes now, the scammers will guide their victims to their bank to take out cash, and then to a cryptocurrency ATM, likely one they have identified on a map as being near the victim. Then they will instruct their victims on how to make the transfer. For scammers, cryptocurrency ATMs offer a significant advantage over other methods of transfer: once the money is in the machine, it’s almost always gone.
“If I were victimized, but I sent the money through my bank, I could call my bank immediately and say, ‘wait, I think there’s a problem with this,’” Rusch said. “Tracing funds through the blockchain can be very difficult to do in a short stretch of time.”
Kimberly said that he wants Coloradans to know that “it’s OK to just not reply to that text. And to talk to somebody else about it or think it through a little bit.”
“If I could give anybody a message, it would be to let them know that law enforcement does not discuss arrest warrants over the phone,” he added. “And that it is incredibly, incredibly rare that anyone would ever be taken to jail for missing jury duty, and that the police will never ask you for money over the phone or the computer, and we would never take money via cryptocurrency.”