I’m beginning to feel like one of those cartoon characters who walks around with a big target on his back.
We have survived decades without serious botheration, but all of a sudden the telephone scammers have our number. We have had multiple calls in the past two or three months that have been variants of two scams that are currently in vogue. I’ll describe them both, hopefully in enough detail that you can catch the drift early in the conversation.
The first is the “Grandma I need bail” scam. You get a call from a youthful-sounding person who starts out maybe cheerily (“Hi, Grandpa, this is your oldest and best-looking grandson”) or sounding stuffed up and hassled (“Hi, Grandpa, it’s me. I need your help”) The caller will do his best to convince you that he is indeed your grandson, sometimes with the help of information gleaned from Facebook, public announcements, etc.
If you let him keep talking, he will quickly get to the point. He is in an embarrassing situation, in fact he is under arrest, and desperately in need of money to bail himself out. He is (sometimes) in a foreign country – Spain or Canada are favorites – and they won’t take his check. He wants to get out of there, and of course he doesn’t want Mom or Dad to know anything about this.
The next step in the process is for him or an accomplice to come up with explicit directions for wire transfer of a specific sum to a particular account somewhere. In one case in Oregon, the “grandparents” were directed to go to the Multonamah County Justice Center and meet with a specific individual. They did, and only the alert intervention of a custodial officer prevented the scammer, who was actually serving prison time at that moment and was in the center on an unrelated hearing, from consummating the deal.
If you pose too serious a challenge early on, the caller will suddenly realize that you aren’t the grandparent after all, that he had dialed a wrong number.
This scam has probably been around for a long time, at least a dozen years and likely more. We all want to help our grandchildren, of course, but exercising a little healthy skepticism when you get a call like that will help ensure that it is in fact your grandchild that you are helping.
The second is the “Windows Technical Staff” scam. I am particularly annoyed with this caller because he woke me up at about 7:15 the other morning with his pitch.
This one works by the caller insisting that he is “certified” by Microsoft and that Microsoft has received reports through the automatic system that your Windows computer has been the subject of cyber attacks, and he has been authorized to solve the problem, no charge to you of course. All he needs is some information about your computer system.
The information, of course, is what he is after. There may be variants where he asks for credit card information, as well, or even for payment, but the real value to the thief is information that can lead to accessing anything that is on your computer
Microsoft has stated that they never make nor do they authorize representatives to make, unsolicited calls, and the company further has issued explicit warnings about this scam. Just tell the caller you don’t have a problem, and hang up immediately — or, if you have an air horn handy, give it a blast into the phone.
There seem to be increasing numbers of scams out there, so protect yourself by questioning any unusual call, no matter how plausible it appears to be. Be especially careful with calls that show “Private” or the equivalent in the caller id.
