Hey guys, there’s a viral article spinning its way around the internet and it’s a personal story about someone who got scammed. As someone who started my current career by trying to stop scammers, I think it’s worth chatting about. The article is over at The Cut and is titled “The Day I Put $50,000 in a Shoe Box and Handed It to a Stranger. I never thought I was the kind of person to fall for a scam.”
This article’s popularity seems to be due entirely to people mocking the author for being outrageously gullible, saying “I would never fall for this stupid scam.” And while I more than anyone understand the impulse to poke fun at people for doing something stupid, I also understand that it can actually be really unhelpful and problematic to react to these stories in that way.
So let’s take a look at how this woman got scammed: “At about 12:30 p.m., my phone buzzed. The caller ID said it was Amazon. I answered.”
Oh. Okay, I see. Yeah I would absolutely never fall for this scam. My own mother has to leave a voicemail arguing her case for why I should answer the damn phone, and even then there’s only like a 15% chance I look at the voicemail transcript. A 2% chance I listen to the voicemail if the transcript doesn’t come through.
Alright, look, I am not going to sit here and pretend like this story isn’t hilarious. Obviously we should always have empathy for victims of crimes but this lady, Charlotte Cowles, has done herself zero favors in the retelling.
First, the scam itself IS very, very obviously a scam. The “Amazon” representative transferred to a contact at the FTC who passed her on to the CIA who told her that her identity had been stolen, she was not to talk to even her own husband about this, and she had to immediately go to the bank, take out $50,000 in cash, put it in a shoebox, and then chuck it into the backseat of a car driven by “an undercover agent.”
But if that were all, I would read Cowle’s story, be grateful that she had the guts to admit to falling for a scam that dumb, and hope that it helps keep other people from falling for the same scam. But that isn’t all. Cowle’s is an astoundingly unsympathetic main character, mostly due to the fact that she is literally “the Cut’s financial-advice columnist.” She appears to have no actual financial expertise, so how did she even get that job? Well, some light Googling reveals that she comes from immense family wealth, seeing as she is a Roosevelt (as in the presidents), she and her husband (who runs a nonprofit) live in a $3.8 million condo, and she has a spare $50,000 on hand because she doesn’t understand how to pay taxes as a freelancer. FYI if you think you’re going to owe the IRS five digits, you pay quarterly taxes so you don’t get fined, unless you’re an absurdly wealthy “Financial advice columnist” who couldn’t care less about things like fines.
Even rich ladies who get paid to do something they don’t understand don’t deserve to get scammed by a very obvious scam, of course, but again, she goes even further to not help herself out: she’s constantly emphasizes the fact that she is NOT a “rube”, that she is the “opposite” of the “typical scam victim,” who is “single, lonely, and economically insecure with low financial literacy.” Again: she thinks freelancers pay taxes once a year. She keeps $80,000 in one checking and one savings account. And she thought the best way to fact check what the scammers were saying was to Google the case number ID given to her by a supposed CIA agent. Why would that be on Google, Charlotte. Imagine putting a random string of numbers into Google and the result being “WARNING THIS IS A SCAM!”
And yeah, even rich egocentric, condescending ladies who get paid to do something they don’t understand don’t deserve to get scammed by a very obvious scam, but there’s one last point to bring up that makes the sympathy difficult: Cowle’s story has a number of holes to the point where I honestly am wondering if it happened at all. For instance, she suggests that she fell for this scam mostly because the scammers mentioned her son and that she would do anything to protect him, but she thought she was talking to a guy from the CIA. They weren’t threatening her son, they were telling her she had to give them all her cash so that they could freeze her accounts to stop the “identity thieves.”
She also had a REAL easy time getting $50,000 in cash out of her bank. I’m not saying it couldn’t happen that way but it’s a bit tidy. I’ve had to take out large amounts of cash before, and every time I got a full on lecture on how to not fall for scams. Funny enough nearly every time it was to pay the first and last month plus deposit plus realtor fee for a slum lord trying to avoid taxes so yeah, it was a scam but not like that. I didn’t put the cash in a shoebox and throw it through a car window. I handed it directly to the slum lord in exchange for a key to an apartment with no hot water and a meth head in the basement.
The larger issues are that Cowle included zero proof with her article. Maybe she showed the fact checkers at The Cut, but it’s a little weird that no one thought we’d want to see the photos she received of the supposed CIA agent badge, or hear part of the recording she says she made of the call. Like, not only would they help us accept that this completely ridiculous thing actually happened, but they would be genuinely interesting and helpful to other potential marks.
Now, why would a financial advice reporter admit to being this gullible? Surely her career is over now, right? Eh, probably not. I bet this essay did serious numbers and at the end of the day, that’s what outlets want. She could have made this up for attention, for a potential book or movie deal, to cover up blowing $50,000 on illegal underground hamster fights, or hell maybe it’s because she decided she didn’t want to pay those freelancer taxes at all and she heard from an accountant that she “could write off losses due to theft.”
It’s ironic that a financial advice columnist would get scammed out of $50,000 but wouldn’t it be even funnier if the financial advice columnist scammed The Cut into publishing a cover for her ingenious tax avoidance scheme?
Okay, no, I don’t really believe that. I wouldn’t be surprised if some aspects of her story are, um, enhanced, either purposely or accidentally. Take, for example, how she states at the start that the scammers knew the last four digits of her social security number. Later she says “If I had to pinpoint a moment that made me think my scammers were legitimate, it was probably when they read me my Social Security number.” One of those things is not like the other. The last four of your social security number are everywhere. A good scammer would read the last four and imply they knew the rest, and if they project enough confidence (intentional word choice there), the mark will walk away thinking they read them the entire number. The mark will then use that as a way to justify why they fell for such a stupid scam: they knew my social security number! Of course I believed them! Even though that never happened. It’s the same with the OG scam I started out busting: psychics. They use what knowledge they have to make marks think they have even more.
And that brings me to what I think is the most important takeaway of this article. Would I fall for this scam? No. I would not. But that’s not the point. The point is that good scammers tailor their cons for their mark, and if this is a real scam that happened, it was very well fitted to this mark. Cowles obviously has very low financial literacy, a lot of privilege that leads her to not actually consider $50,000 enough money to make her pause before chucking it through a car window, and a very high opinion of herself. I’ve said this over and over again, most recently of course in regards to the “intellectual dark web” members getting scammed by UFO proponents: it is so, so much easier to scam someone who genuinely believes they can never be scammed, someone who has a very high opinion of themselves, and someone who thinks of themselves as The Main Character. Of course Brett Weinstein believes that a top secret government agent would choose him to reveal evidence of aliens visiting the Earth. He’s such an important public intellectual! And of course the CIA would call Charlotte Cowles and guide her through a madcap adventure to protect her and her family from evil identity thieves. She’s far too smart to fall for anything else.
That’s why I hope to strike a balance here between the people making fun of Cowles and the people who want to stress that anyone can be scammed. You’re both right. Cowles is a naive doofus who fully deserves to be mocked for her condescending attitude and her completely undeserved success as a financial advice columnist. Like, I can say that no one deserves to be hit by a bus but if some jerk writes a book about how only idiots get hit by buses and then he gets hit by a bus you have to admit that that would be very funny. And in this case it’s more like he gets hit by two buses, one right after the other, like in Meet Joe Black.
But yes, it IS still worth always putting an asterisk next to our mockery to remind people that scams really do happen to every kind of person. Maybe this one won’t get you, because you don’t answer the phone or you know that phone numbers can be spoofed (yes even government offices), but yeah there’s a scam out there that would work on you. A scam that exploits your greed, or your loneliness, or your love for someone, or your trust in authority. And we should be grateful when victims step forward about getting scammed, because a LOT of scams persist in part based on simple embarrassment. People don’t want to admit (to themselves or others) that they are being scammed, so they end up throwing good money after bad, and scammers get away to scam again.
With that in mind, I would like to tell you that I have been scammed. Yes! Me! I mean, sort of. A few years back I moved into a house that had a security system, complete with alarms and lights and cameras and stuff like that. But it was all run by one of the large, nationwide companies you’ve heard advertised on your favorite true crime podcast, and so to get it up and running I figured that the first step would be talking to one of their representatives to learn about how much it costs and what all the options were.
We were literally in the midst of moving, driving a car full of essentials from our old apartment to the new house, when I decided (from the passenger seat) to multitask by calling the alarm company, who by the way I’ll just say it was ADT. They were extremely confusing – no, I don’t have a current account, I just need to talk to someone about this house’s former account. No, I don’t want to buy a plan right now, I want to talk to someone about what we already have installed. I got transferred several times and was nearing the end of my rope when a smooth talking guy insisted that I just needed to set up a new account in order to have someone come out and look over what is currently installed at the house, and that yes they needed my credit card number to activate the account but obviously I would not be charged unless and until we chose a plan. So I did it, I gave the guy my credit card number and he confirmed that someone would be out next Friday to chat.
Why did I do that? Well unlike Cowles I’ll admit it’s because I was naive. And I can also point out what specifically made me fall for it, and it wasn’t the noble fear of keeping my son (dog) safe: I had called the main number on this large company’s website and I could not imagine that a company that well-known would scam me, or that they would (as they later explained to me) transfer me unknowingly to a third party company they hire to make sales. Yes, it is I, frequent critic of capitalism, who apparently has some inherent trust in large corporations. I was also tired and frustrated. They relied on all of that to get me. I was transferred repeatedly to increase the frustration and my desire to just get off the phone, and the closer who I finally reached took full advantage.
When I inevitably saw the $200 charge on my credit card bill, I had to spend another hour on the phone yelling at people until they issued me a refund. The experience soured me so much on the company that I canceled everything and now my home is protected by a system that is not reliant upon ADT.
This is all pretty low stakes compared to, you know, $50,000 cash in a shoebox. I got my money back and all is well. But I still think back to being in the car all frustrated, and giving them my credit card number, and I get SO SO SO embarrassed. I think of my husband driving the car and him thinking “why the hell do they need her credit card number?” I KNOW that if he were the one on the phone, he’d have told them to pound sand before he even gave them his full name. And I cringe at all of that and I wonder if I’ll ever do that again, if I will get so annoyed and spun around that I just hand someone money without thinking.
And that’s good. That’s really good information for me to have, knowing what it felt like to get taken for a ride, knowing what emotional state makes me most likely to fall for something, and yeah just knowing in general that I CAN be scammed. And if you’re smart, you’ll take this as an opportunity to reflect on what kind of scam would be most likely to work on you, because there are a lot out there that are far more clever than the one Cowles supposedly fell for. There’s the “pig butchering” scam in which people (who are usually being trafficked, it’s worth noting) spend months building rapport with victims via dating apps before getting them involved in a financial scam like crypto. There are malicious apps that steal your information. There are the scammers who call up marks and claim to have kidnapped their loved ones, or even to be their loved ones in peril. And let me tell you, that’s the one I’m dreading once deepfakes become more common. Imagine getting a frantic call from your grandson who says he’s stuck in another country and desperately needs you to wire him $500, and it’s his voice. Hell, maybe it’s even his face on Facetime.
So yeah, it’s worth remembering that scammers can be very clever. There IS a scam out there that you would fall for. Don’t mock victims for having a moment of weakness, or not seeing through something that you think you would see through from the safe comfort of your sofa. But do feel free to mock Charlotte Cowles for seeming completely insufferable, if you want.
