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We don't have time. That's not going to work. We need to do this immediately. We have to act quickly. You are in danger. Your son is in danger. We do not have time to explore other.
Options from Mamma. I'm Meya Friedman, and this is no filter. It's a normal, boring weekday morning at the end of October twenty twenty three, and you're a busy working journalist who writes a financial advice column for New York Magazine. You have a two year old child and a busy day ahead of you. Your husband's already left for work, and you've dressed your son up as a slice of
pizza because it's Halloween. Your plan for the rest of the day is to drop him at daycare, come back to the apartment and work, and then pick him up in the afternoon to take him trick or trade. And then the phone rings. Just a few hours later, you will be alone in your bedroom in shock. After handing over your life savings fifty thousand dollars in cash to a stranger in the back of a car on the street outside your apartment, begging him not to hurt your family.
That could never happen, Right, it's the plot of a thriller. I can almost see Julia Roberts looking confused and then panicked as she realizes what's happened. But it wasn't a movie. It really happened to Charlotte Cow's last year, and you're about to hear how it happened. What was said to her on the other end of the phone that made a young, smart, Internet savvy, highly educated and accomplished journalist who's written about money in finance for The New York Times,
what made her hand over all her money to a stranger. Well, here's Charlotte Cows, who has been generous enough to share her story in the hope that it won't happened to anyone who hears it. Because this isn't just a story about a scam. This is a story about psychological warfare and how it can be used on regular people like you and me. I want to ask you, Charlotte, where you were in your life before October of twenty twenty three. You're pretty successful, You are pretty successful.
Well, thank you. I was and continued to be a journalist. I had worked for a New York magazine for The Cut. I was an editor there for a number of years, and my old boss there asked me if I would be interested in writing about personal finance for them and doing a column. Before then, I really I had no experience writing about money. She thought to ask me because she remembered from various ideas meetings that I was always really interested in the dynamics that money introduced to relationships
and really how people navigated it. And it's sort of a rich topic, no pun intended. It shapes people's relationships to work, to their coworkers, to their peers, to their spouses and significant others and their friends. Especially in a place like New York where it is so expensive and there is a lot of money. It's sort of this like veil over everything. So she knew that I had been interested in that before, but also that I am a lay person because I don't have a huge background
in personal finance. I would be approaching the topic from the same place as most readers. So the idea was never that I was going to be giving my own personal finance advice. It was that I would be reporting it out and talking to experts and sharing that advice with readers. So I've been doing that ever since, and I've also reported on a lot of financial topics for The New York Times. Something that I think I have developed a niche for doing is sort of explaining financial
topics in ways that normal people can understand. Yeah, you know a lot about it, and I think that, again that stems from the fact that this isn't like my native language either, So if I can understand it, then I can hopefully explain it in a way that other people can understand.
From a personal standpoint, You're married, you live in Brooklyn with a young son and an old cat. Yes, and you describe yourself as someone who is maddeningly rational and certainly not someone who fits the profile of a scam victim. But then everything changed on Halloween, ironically, October thirty first, in twenty twenty three. How did your day begin on October thirty first?
In many ways, it was a very normal day. I had a deadline for work. It was also Halloween, and I have a two year old, so that, you know, sort of added a little a little extra.
His first real Halloween that he was kind of ware.
Exactly. There was a Halloween parade at school, so you.
Know you dressed him up like a pizza.
Yeah, exactly.
Then the phone rang while you were working. It was around lunchtime. Who was on the phone.
The first caller was a woman who said she was calling from Amazon. She was calling to ask about suspicious activity on my account. And I think everyone has received calls like this from a car. I certainly have, and Amazon does in fact, or at least at the time, they did make outgoing calls of this nature. So at first I really didn't think anything of it. If anything, I was grateful to her for reaching out about this. I'd seen headlines about scammers and Amazon, so I kind
of like seem implausible. She was very professional. She said all of the normal things that you would hear on a call like this, like this call is being recorded for quality assurances. She asked me about some charges that were absolutely not charges I had made. It was thousands
of dollars worth of electronic equipment. She said that they had been made under my business account, and I don't have a business account, so that's what I told her, and she said, well, it looks like several have actually been opened under your name, so we should report this as an identity theft. All flag those accounts will shut them down. And this has actually been so prevalent lately that we're working directly with someone at the federal level
who is helping us to investigate this. Would you be willing to speak with him? And it seemed odd to me, obviously, But I did know and do know that scams were proliferating rapidly, and it didn't seem entirely out of the realm of possible that there would be some kind of special investigation or you know, Amazon is huge, It's an enormous retailer and millions of people use it, and if there was, you know, something happening at large scale, I don't know it just sure. It was just like who knows.
And also it's like it's annoying at this point, like you're busy, you've got a deadline. It's like, yeah, I'll talk to another guy. Can we just saw like you weren't worried that money had come out of your account. It was more like, oh, identity fraud, Like that's annoying, let's just quickly sort this out. And the government agency that she mentioned, the federal government agency was one that you were familiar with, and it all you know, it all checks out.
It didn't seem crazy, like no one came out of the gate asking for money. That part didn't actually come until hours and hours and hours later.
And that's when you were introduced to Calvin Mitchell. He was the guy on the phone who purported to be from the FTC, the Federal Trade Commission. How did he convince you of his authority?
He convinced me of his authority by immediately telling me all of the information that he knew about me. He knew my name, obviously, but he knew my address, He had my social Security number, he knew who I lived with, my husband and son, and he knew the names of my family members. And he told me that we were being investigated, that I specifically was being investigated for fraud
and money wandering, among other things. And he told me that we were in danger and that we were being watched by a criminal organization that had stolen my identity and was using it for these crimes.
I want to ask you about the social security number, because we don't have those in Australia. I suppose the closest we would have would be like a tax file number, but it's not the same a social Security number. Can you explain the kind of what it means a social Security number in America?
Yes, you're assigned one at birth, and it encapsulates your identity. It is sort of the most basic form of identifying who you are.
So you would need it if you were seeking medical care, or if you were just applying for a driver's license, or because for us, a tax file numbers just connected sort of to tax and things like that, but a social Security number is more broad, it's more right. Yes, I assume that your Social Security number is not something that you kind of share widely. So for someone to know your Social Security number without you telling them, it would seem that they were part of a legitimate government agency.
Definitely. Yes, it's not something that you just throw out. Willy Nelly and I know a lot of people who never put it in an email. You know, they'll only share it over the phone. It is considered something that is confidential.
CAW it informed you that you had twenty two bank accounts, nine vehicles, and four properties registered in your name, and that you'd wired more than three million dollars to Jamaica and a ruck, and that a car had been rented in your name and been linked to drug trafficking in New Mexico, and that you had warrants out for your arrest. Now when you list those things, it sounds like a
Quentin Tarantino movie, right. Can you explain what your emotional state was at this time and how Calvin managed to sort of drip feed these things in a way that didn't make you go, oh, well, this is bullshit.
So I think by starting with the very specific information that he did have about me, he had me on the defense from the beginning. And also by leading with the fact that we were in danger and that we were being watched. I think that really made me sit up and listen. And while the rest of that information seemed so ridiculous, Like I was laughing as he was
saying it, I was like, this is absurd. It's a tactic of snowing you with information so that you can't get a word in, and every time you're like, well that's ridiculous, they just give you more information. So you're already back on your heels. You know, when someone accused me of having twenty two bank accounts and you know, nine cars. I'm like, I don't even know how to counter.
That because it's so implausible that like it's laughable. But then what if it's not right?
I mean, like if someone accuses me of plagiarism, for example, then I could defend myself against that. Whereas like this was just like so entirely outside of my realm of experience and understanding that I didn't really know where to start. But I was very nervous. I also very much felt that this was all some kind of misunderstanding, right.
And I imagine he kept saying that right to Calvin.
Yah when he just had to clear it up, Like, what are the next steps? Let's just get through this. Obviously this is absurd, and how do we clear this up?
What was Calvin's domeana? And did he sound like a regular government official? Often with they scams and I've had many scam calls myself the law and is very bad. They speak in broken English. It doesn't sound in any way professional. Sometimes you can tell they're reading from a script. As a journalist, you've interviewed many, many, many many people over your career. What was Calvin's vibe, For want of a better word.
It was very authoritative. He spoke with a lot of confidence. The line was clear, It did not sound, you know, like he was calling from.
A call center.
Yeah yeah, And he had a vague accent, but his English was otherwise perfect.
One of the most significant features of this was how he managed to keep you on the phone. And you've since discovered that in the psychological warfare, that this already had become and would continue to be until you finally got off the phone. How did he keep you on the phone? How did he stop you from like hanging up and saying can I call you back? Because there were many points in which you were like, I'm suspicious, and you even said it. What were those points and how did he respond?
I told him that I a was busy and didn't have time to keep talking to him, and also that I had no proof that he was who he said he was, and that I didn't believe him. The initial phone call had come through Amazon, and it had shown up on my caller ID as being from Amazon, and he told me to go to the main FTC homepage and look up the tip line number and then to hang up and he would call me from that number.
Then he did that, so you felt that you'd independently verified it.
Well, I still wasn't sure. I mean, I wasn't sure about any of this, and I was still extremely skeptical throughout the entire thing. You know, I said, well, couldn't you have just spoofed this number? And he was like, government numbers cannot be spoofed, and I, of course now know that they can be. But he was so confident and authoritative in everything he said. Usually whenever I did stop and ask a question, he would just answer it with great self assurance and then move.
On and hit you with more information.
Exactly, And sometimes he was just repeating the same things that he was saying before. But I just sort of couldn't get a word in edgewise, and I felt very much that I was reacting to everything he was saying.
You texted your husband, didn't you? While you were on the phone, yes, what did you say?
He called me several times, was texting me asking if I was okay? What was going on? And at that point Calvin told me that I could not tell anyone what was happening, and that if I did talk to my husband about what was happening, my husband would then be implicated in the investigation. You know, at that point, I'm sort of like, I'm like, well, if we're both like arrested, Like who's going to put my kid to bed?
You know, like you kind of start like going through all of these things where you're just like, but wait, if this happens, then what happens?
And you're like, even if it would take a couple of days to clear up, like how do you prove that you haven't done something? And maybe yeah, and you were very vulnerable because of your child and they knew that.
Yeah, I think that they found my weak point and they pressed on it, and they realized that I responded to that specific threat. And whenever I started kind of backing up and being like I don't know about this, or like this just doesn't sound right, or I'm going to call a lawyer, or I'm going to talk to the police.
About this, all of which you said yes.
Or is there like some kind of office that I can go to where we can sort this out in person. I'm very uncomfortable with doing this all over the phone. They would say, we don't have time. That's not going to work. We need to do this immediately. We have to act quickly. You are in danger. Your son is in danger. We do not have time to explore other options.
After the short break, the Scammers Book only exits, and Charlotte finds herself deep into the most terrifying day of her life. Charlotte, this must have been surreal because it's still a regular day. You're in your own home alone, your son's at kindy, everything around you looks normal, and yet this thing is unfolding in your ear with this guy. It must have felt like you'd just fallen into some kind of weird vortex of hell.
That's exactly how it felt. It kind of felt like I was just like walking along and suddenly like a trapdoor opened and I fell through it. It was incredibly bizarre. And my instinct, which I think would be anyone's instinct, is just how do I get out of this? Like what do I have to do to.
Make this stop and go away and just sort this out? So as Calvin kept escalating it, as you wrote so beautifully, there was nothing so far that you could see what his angle was. Because he hadn't asked you to do anything. He kept making it seem like he was saving you and he just wanted to help you. Clear this up, and he was the one that was standing between you and all these bad people and bad things.
Mm hmm. Yeah. What happened next was that he connected me with another one of his colleagues, which I've now learned is actually a very normal part of these more intricate scams. They have a number of different people and they kind of pass you in between them, which creates this aura of like there being a group of people who you're working with, so that it kind of adds to their authority. So he passed me to one of his colleagues who said that he worked for the CIA,
and the CIA investigates international crimes. They don't operate on American soil, and so I was like, why is the CIA working on this? And they're like, well, it's because there's international money laundering and internet drug trafficking, and so you're caught up in a CIA investigation. Again. It all truly sounded crazy, and I knew how crazy it sounded. It almost sounded so crazy that I was like, they couldn't have made this up. It's like too wild to just be a fabrication.
Yeah, right, So it's almost like if that have said, hey, there's been this mix up. Can you just give us your bank details? You to be like, this is such a scam. But because it was like it's the CIA, it's money laundering, it's drug lords, suddenly it's like no one would make this up. It's crazy, so it must be real. I totally get that.
Yeah. I mean I don't entirely know if I ever fully believed it, But I was so frightened that it didn't feel like I could call their bluff, Like I didn't know what else to do, you know, like if I went to the police, they wouldn't have known what to do either.
Right, because it felt so big.
Yeah, and also on how everyone's trigger treating and people are coming in and out of your building, and I live in a big apartment building, and I was just thinking, like, there's just going to be hundreds of people walking in and out of this apartment building all day and all night tonight. There was just a profound feeling of not being safe and wanting to do whatever I had to do to keep my family safe.
The first time the idea of you withdrawing money from your account came up, what was your immediate impression and how long would you been on the phone by that time. By that time, it had been several hours without a break, without food.
Yeah. He told me that the next steps for the investigation would be that they needed to freeze all of my assets, everything under my name, so that they would be able to catch the people who had stolen my identity, and that they weren't sure how long that was going to happen, how long all of my assets would be frozen, that if I needed to be able to have money to live, I should withdraw that in cash from my
accounts because I may not have access to it for months. Again, it seemed weird, but there was a certain sort of logic to it that I was like, Okay, if you'd freeze all of my accounts, then I guess I better get some cash out.
Calvin asked you how much money you'd need to live for a year if it took a long time to go through the courts and the process, and you estimated around fifty thousand dollars, and you had a savings account that you'd squirreled money away in for emergencies, and over years and years and years you'd saved this money. So he said, you have to go and withdraw that, which is how you found yourself at a bank with him
still in your pocket on the phone. What did the bank teller do when you said, I want to withdraw fifty thousand dollars in cash.
I was really surprised that they let me do it, Like, I just wasn't sure if that was gonna fly.
Yeah.
I can't even think of when I've withdrawn more than like a thousand dollars from the bank. And she kind of raised her eyebrows and she looked surprised, but she didn't ask me what it was for. She just went into the back and got out like a big box and counted out the money and she gave it to me. She also gave me a sheet of paper that was sort of like a watch out for Scams one page, and I did look at it. I mean, it had certainly not escaped me that this might be some kind
of elaborate thing. I was worried that maybe someone was following me and was going to take the money from me when I was walking home. I didn't know where this was going, and I was very concerned.
How did Calvin convince you to keep him on the line while you were doing all of that? What reason did.
He give He told me, And again it was bizarre, but he told me that because I was being investigated, there needed to be a continuous connection. I needed to stay on the line with him in order for that money to not be part of the investigation. I don't even know if I'm like explaining this point.
So I understand. It's like he needs to almost be a witness on the phone to everything that was happening. I get it. And he still hadn't talked about you needing to give the money to anyone at the stage.
No, No, it really wasn't until the final moment when a man came to my house, which was terrifying that he said, walk out to his car, put the money in the backseat, don't say anything to him, and the
car drove away. He told me that it was being brought to a safe house where it would be secured, and then I would receive a Treasury check, and because my identity had been so compromised, I would receive a new Social Security number and have to sort of like rebuild my whole identity, and that once I did that, I could deposit the money into a new bank account and go from there.
Over this period of time. How long had you been on the phine.
We'd been on the phone for over five hours, probably closer to six.
You went trickle trading with the phone still on and in your pocket. Is this after you'd given the money to the car and they're driven away? How did you feel when you handed over the money? Did you feel oh shit? Or did you feel relieved? How did you feel?
I felt pretty numb. I mostly was really nervous to be out in the open like that. I felt very exposed just to be out on the street meeting a stranger with that amount of money, especially after he had told me so many times that I was under surveillance. So I was mostly just eager to get back inside. Really, I was really terrified that the man was going to get out of the car, or that he was going to try to come inside with me and my son was at home. I just wanted him to leave as
quickly as possible. I didn't know what he was going to say or do, and I was mostly just at that point just trying to get it over with any sort of resolution was better.
Than being in that state of fear and penny. Yeah, once you'd handed the money over, did Calvin's domain a change on the phone.
Not really. No. He told me that he was going to be in touch with next Steps. He sent me a picture of the Treasury check and said that it would be delivered to my home in the morning. And he said that he was getting me an appointment with the Social Security Office to go through everything and they would help me get a new Social Security number in the morning. And that was a big relief to me. And he said that overnight my social Security number would be deactivated and I would.
Essentially, like, you know, get a new identity.
Yeah. And at that point my husband knew that something weird was going on, but I wouldn't tell him what it was.
You had mentioned something about identity theft to him in a text, which he then deleted because Calvin said, don't involve him, don't tell anyone. That's called blocking the exits, isn't it.
Yes. Yeah, it's a specific technique to make you really feel like you have nowhere to turn. And that's also because as soon as you get a gut check from
someone else, it breaks the spell. I've since interviewed a number of people who study scams, and that is one of the biggest factors in whether or not people actually go through with losing money is if they are interrupted by someone in their life, then even if they don't tell that person what's going on, just having that sort of like bringing you back to earth and pulling you back into your own life, it can be incredibly effective.
After these break the moment the penny drop and Charlotte realizes that she's been scanned and what she did next. In a story with so many incredibly difficult moments in it, or a day with so many difficult moments in it, the most difficult must have been the realization that you'd been scanned. Did it happen quickly or over time? Both.
There was a moment when the phone went dead and I called back and they picked up, and I said, you know, I lost the connection. I'm still waiting to hear back for confirmation about the appointment with the Social Security office, and the woman who answered, who said she was sort of part of the team, so that they hadn't been able to get one tonight, but that they would call me in the morning, and that was the first time that they had been inconsistent with their information.
They got sloppy at the end, and yeah, they had no motivation to keep up. The first time I suddenly realized it, you know, like the room went blurry and I was like, oh my god. Because the whole time I was always pretty aware that there was a possibility that maybe they were the identity thieves. Yeah, and that this was sort of like part of the larger scheme that had definitely occurred to me. It didn't occur to me, I think, because I was so afraid of it being true.
It didn't occur to me that like the entire thing had been made up, like starting with the Amazon stuff. Like I think the first thing that I realized was the money is gone. And the second thing I realized was I still thought that my identity had been stolen and compromise. It took a few hours for that part to kind of fall away and be like, oh, actually, so on the one hand, I've lost fifty thousand dollars, but on the other hand, were much safer than I thought.
I was, well, yeah, we're not being surveiled, my identity hasn't been stolen, So it was sort of this like horrible swap.
It must have been very intense, all of those rushing thoughts and untangling everything that had happened and through the day.
Yeah, yeah, who.
Was the first person you told?
My husband? Immediately, I was just sobbing, and I ran out and told him, and he was really concerned. We put my son to bed, and then my brother is a lawyer, and so I called him and we conferenced in my parents and I told them what had happened, and they encouraged me to call the police. So I called the police and they came right over and they took a report. But they were like, you are so stupid.
Oh, that must have been awful.
I mean, it was also just so clear that they were unequipped to do anything about it.
Yeah.
They sort of like had all this standard lines like no government agent will ever ask you for money, and I was like, well, they weren't really asking you.
Never felt like you had a choice.
Yeah, yeah, And of course I know, I know that government agencies do not ask you for money. I know that, but under this particular circumstance, it felt different.
Because it was incremental because they weren't asking you for money. At first, they were trying to protect you. They were trying to protect your money. Right when you told people the story and slowly you told friends and people close to you, you say, most of them say the same thing. You don't seem like the type of person this would happen to. What do they mean by that?
So this is really interesting because this is when I started finding out how incredibly prevalent these scams are. So first of all, people are like, oh my god, you really don't seem like the type of person this would happen to. And what they mean is, I'm not old. I know how to use the internet. I'm you know, relatively savvy and can deploy critical thinking.
And you're ivyly educated. You write about personal finance, you're a reporter, you're a journalist, so you've got a sort of a skeptical, quizical mind.
Yeah, and people think that this is something that just happens to Dottie Grandma's who don't know how to open their email, you know. But the more that I did talk about it, the more people were also like, Oh, that happened to my sister, or that happened to me, or that happened to a friend of mine who lost four hundred and fifty thousand dollars, which was the case. So that's when I started realizing that this was happening all the time and to people who you really wouldn't expect.
And also the fact that there is this stigma that it doesn't happen to young people who are well educated, or it doesn't happen to people who are smart enough to know better, actually makes people much more vulnerable because they think that they're not going to be targeted, or they think that if they are a target, they'll see right through it and that they're not vulnerable. That really started to make me think about writing about it.
Also, your brother, who's a lawyer, as you said, noted that what you experience sounded a lot like a coerced confession. What does that mean?
Yeah, that was really interesting to hear. And I wound up reaching out to a man who studies coerst confessions. He's an academic, he's written a book about them. His name is Saul Cassen, and he at first was sort of skeptical about the connection, and as soon as I told him what had happened to me, he was like, this is exactly the same. Even the amount of time
that I had been on the phone. He said that coerst confessions or false confessions are much more likely to happen when interrogations start to take longer than a couple of hours.
So Cole's confession is when someone I assume confesses to something they haven't done. You didn't confess to doing anything. How is it the same?
So it's similar in that I complied with something that I knew to be wrong and that made no sense to me, and I followed directions that I knew were ridiculous against my better judgment because I was just trying to fix it. I was like, all of this can surely be sorted out. If we just get to the end of this, then like, yeah, it would be fine. Right. It's one of the reasons why innocent people often wave. In the US, we have something called Miranda rights. It's
your right to an attorney. It's one of the reasons why a lot of innocent people wave their Miranda rights because they're like, well, I'm innocent, so I don't need a lawyer, and so everything's going to be fine. So you actually put yourself in a more vulnerable position when you're innocent, because you assume that everything's going to work out and it's going to be okay, and this will all get sorted out and you've to and go along with what people want, then everything will work out.
I want to unpack what they did, how they actually executed this psychological warfare, which is what it was. What have you learnt about what they did and how long it was planned for.
So I've since read a bunch of books. I've talked to a lot of people who have been scammed. There's sort of a playbook that they followed, and there's even an actual book that I recommend that everyone read. It's called Influence by Robert Chaldini. He wrote it over twenty years ago, and it's fascinating. It's basically about the psychology of influencing somebody or deployed in the wrong way, coercing someone into doing something that you want them to do.
So they're known as Chaldini's seven principles of influence, and they are reciprocity, so basically like I'm helping you, so you feel like you owe somebody something. Commitment or consistency, So the people on the phone with me were very committed to quote helping me and very consistent in their stories. Consensus or social proof, which is like when you see other people doing something, you're like well, I guess that's
what I'm supposed to do. Research shows that people are more likely to follow social cues when they are in a situation that they're unsure about. So if I'm very confident in a situation and I see a bunch of people doing something else, I'm like, well, I already know what I'm doing, so I'm not going to do that.
But if you're really out to see and you see a bunch of people acting in a certain way, or you have someone with great authority telling you to do something, then you're much more likely to follow along.
I guess since I have someone on the back foot and they're much more easily persuaded exactly.
The fourth one is authority, and that's very authoritative. The fifth one is liking, so being nice, and he kept sort of alternating between being quite threatening and then also having these moments of kindness, like asking me about my kid and my family and my work and trying to emphasize the fact that he was trying to help me. The sixth one is scarcity, which is in this case,
there was the time scarcity. He was giving me an exploding offer, like he could help me, but we had to move really quickly, and time was short, and I couldn't to anyone else because you know, we had to keep the scope very new. And the last one is unity, which is the sort of element of like we're working together, we have your back.
How did they get the information in the first place?
That is another really good question. I have since learned that we all, I think know in the abstract that our personal information is out there, Like if you are a person online, your data is sort of like floating around. I think like most people, I've always assumed that that's just sort of the cost of like being online. I'm not doing anything bad, so I figured who cares? And also like I'm not interesting enough for anyone to single me out as when target right.
Yeah, it's like when some people go, oh, but the government if you put aland the government's going to survail you, and you're like, well, it'll be pretty boring for the government because I go to work and I go home.
Yeah, like I don't really know what's in it for them. Yeah, to you know, not even the government, but just like anyone anyone like go after me and like living my mom life with my husband and kat.
Yeah, you wouldn't see yourself as a target because like you're not ail On Musk or Jeff Bezoso, right right, Avanka Trump kind of vibes yeah.
Right, Like I'm not someone who has that kind of like exciting profile.
So why did they choose you?
I interviewed someone at Finra, which is basically like a sort of consumer watchdog. They work with the government on protecting consumers and they do a lot of work around
scams their nonprofit. And I interviewed someone there who investigates scams and studies them, and she said that what usually happens is every time there's a data breach, and you know, I get letters like every week and it's like the Vets Office had a data breach or you know, the whatever random hospital that I went to one time to get like my toe x ray had a data beaty. You know, like like it happens all the time, and I always kind of figure like, well, there's nothing I
can really do about it, and who cares. Someone has my phone number.
Yeah, someone has the x ray of my foot. Good luckily, right, yeah, yeah, right.
But what happens is every time there's a data breach, you know, they sort of comb through it and that data gets scraped and sordid and repackaged and sort of bundled and sold exactly when there is a big enough bundle, it gets sold, and so essentially like it's kind of when your numbers up. I don't think that I was specifically targeted because people were like, oh, she must have
fifty thousand dollars. I think it was just that they had enough information about me that they felt pretty confident that they could make a go of it.
How long do you think they prepared and where do you imagine they even were?
They were almost certainly overseas.
Have you found out which countries these things happening and how they work?
Yeah, it's really devastating. A lot of the people who conduct these scams are actually trafficked. They're victims themselves. So I don't think that these people were even necessarily like malicious psychopaths who were trying to torture.
Me, like Calvin and the other people that you spoke to on the find that day.
They may very well have been truly desperate.
When you say trafficked, like in what kind of situations? Because these are seemingly well educated people that can think quickly on their fate, you know, the English is outstanding. They can work and you know, spontaneously improvised. That takes a lot of skill. And when you think of people that are trafficked to usually think of people that are really disadvantaged, not educated.
Yeah, a lot of times what happens is there's actually a big report on this in the Wall Street Journal that just came out. A lot of times what happens is these are people who are well educated and they respond to fake job listings that say, you know, like here's this great job, you get interviewed for it, and then you get the job, and here is where you'll be picked up to go to the call center or whatever, like the campus of this company where you're going to
be worked. And then they get whisked off instead to these sort of camps essentially where they are forced to work and force to meet these phone calls.
Countries does this happen, It.
Happens a lot in Southeast Asia. It's heartbreaking and really awful.
Is it your understanding that Calvin and the people that you spoke to on that day, of which there were probably about four or five people, do you believe that they were actually physically in the same space.
I really don't know. I wouldn't be surprised if they were. I mean I was never like on hold for any period of time. Like I was transferred very quickly. It was very sophisticated, and.
I didn't get the money presumably.
Well another thing, because I was curious about that, I was like, how did they how did they get this guy to my apartment? Like how did this even work? The woman from FINRA told me that often in these situations, first of all, it is unusual for there to be a physical money pickup. That was a pretty unusual scenario, but in this case it really fit. I mean, it was just very effective. Like I think if they told me to wire money anywhere, I would have hung up right.
Yeah.
But the fact that I was feeling so vulnerable because my family was inside, just the physical presence was so terrifying that I mean I would have done anything. I would have been like, do you also want my passport?
Here you go? Like I just make it stop?
Yeah?
Who is driving that car?
So it could have either been just a courier that they sent who thought he was just picking something up, or it also could have been what's called a money mule, which means that it's someone else who was caught up, who's also a victim, who was caught up in some sort of scammer being blackmailed in some way themselves by the same organization.
Who's running this stuff? Who's the big boss?
I don't think anyone knows. I certainly don't know. I wish I did, But they seem sort of like Medusa, like they shut down one and another one grows up in its place.
You know. I just finally I wanted to ask you about how you've feign It's been nearly a year since then, since it happened. Two things. Firstly, why did you decide to write about it, because that is a big deal, like the shame, I imagine would have been huge and potentially the biggest thing that you've been grappling with. How have you metabolized that? And what's happened since you've decided to publish that story which went viral internationally.
I was pretty shocked by how viral it went. I don't think anyone can fully anticipate.
Because that's the whole thing in itself, the experience of going viral.
It really is, especially like I've written a lot of stories, some of which have gone pretty viral, but nothing that was ever personal and very vulnerable like that story was. So that was, I mean totally terrifying.
Were you worried that people would think that you is stupid?
Yes, yes, and I know that many people do, but I mean there's nothing I can really do about that besides just keep doing what I'm doing.
How do you feel about the whole experience now? Almost A ye, Laida.
First of all, one of the reasons that I really wanted to write the story was that I also read studies that showed that the psychological aftermath of being scammed
is devastating. I mean, it's devastating to lose any amount of money, but especially for many people, especially things like you hear with these they're called pig butchering scams, but just like they take place over months or even years, they happen a lot with romance scams just creates this like incredibly trusting relationship and just like takes everything that
a person has. That's financially devastating, but psychologically, I mean, people never recover, and even people who lose much less money than I did and much less money than other people do the sense of vulnerability and it's such a violating experience that a lot of people have real anxiety depression, like paranoia afterwards, and they feel really ashamed and really isolated.
And scams are wildly underreported as a result, and a lot of people just feel like there's something wrong with them, like they must have done something wrong, and they pathologize it is that.
What you did well?
Luckily, because I'm a journalist, my instinct is to research things when I'm trying to understand why they happen. And so as soon as I started researching, and as soon as I started talking to people, and people just came out of the woodwork telling me that the same thing had happened to them, I was maybe uniquely vulnerable to this scam. I didn't tell the story because I believe
that what happened to me could happen to anyone. But I do think that there is a scam out there for everyone, and it's not a matter of you being so smart that you can out with them and stay ahead of this. It really is kind of a matter of luck and a matter of hopefully being prepared so that you can maybe avoid it.
You had some people reach out to you and say that they were in the middle of being scammed when they read your story and what was it about your story that made them realize, Oh, my god, that's me.
There was a study that came out about people who had been targeted by scammers, and it looked at what was the difference between people who lost money and who didn't, who somehow managed to figure out what was going on and disengage. And they found that the people who managed to disengage, the difference wasn't age, wasn't like they were younger or savvier, or more well educated, or had a higher socioeconomic status. It was actually just that they had
heard of a similar scam happening to someone else. People think that there are all of these protective things that they can put in place, but actually the best thing that you can do is reduced the stigma around scams so that people talk about them more.
That's incredible. So when you think about, like, I hope that the story that you tell yourself about this now and your role in it is this happened to you, And by being generous enough to share your story, you have saved tens of thousands of people, no doubt, because your story has been read by tens of millions of people around the world. You've probably saved tens of thousands of people from being scammed. That's a pretty phenomenal legacy.
It is very gratifying. I get emails every day from people who say that they were targeted and because they had read the story, they hang up. I also get emails almost every day from people who were scammed and have never told anyone and live with this incredible wheat and guilt and shame, and reading the story made them seek help and seek support or helped their spouse understand what happened to them, and that's also very gratifying. It's
really humbling. I mean, it was still one of the worst days of my life, and I don't wish it upon anyone. And this is, you know, this sort of small thing that I can do to try to fight back. It's weird when you write something like this and it becomes much bigger than you. So there's an element of it where I am also just very eager to move on at this point.
I am sure you are. I look forward to you being able to close the chapter and move on, and I'm just so grateful that you agreed to take the time to talk to me before you did close that chapter and move on. Charlotte, Thank you phenomenal, Thank you so much. The thing about this story and why you need to hear it, is that Charlotte does not fit the profile of someone we think of when it comes
to scams. As she said, you think of an old person, your grandfather, your mom, maybe someone who's not hugely Internet savvy, someone who might live alone, someone who might be easily confused or gullible. But as you heard, this was no ordinary scam. It was all that psychological warfare, because that's
what scammers do. And there's so much victim blaming and shaming when it comes to these kind of crimes, because there is that perception that we should know better, or that if you fall prey to a scam, it's because your naive or stupid or ignorant. And Charlotte experience that shaming. The story that you just heard is one that she's still grappling with, and I'm sure you could hear that, and she's chosen to share it because if she can help other people, then she can make meaning from the
most terrifying and bewildering day of her life. But she doesn't want to be known just for this story, and nor should she be. What struck me so much is what she said about the scammers finding her weak point and then pressing on it, because we all have a weak point, right For her, it was her son and the idea that he could be in danger. Who can't relate to that that someone that you love could be in danger if you don't do what someone tells you
to do. After our conversation ended, Charlotte was telling me about how AI is now making these scams even more sophisticated so they can mimic the sound of your loved one's voice. So imagine that you picked up the phone and it was your partner or your friend, or your mother or your child saying that they needed money desperately.
Imagine that. And she said that families need to have a password in case something like this ever happens, because, of course, in the moment you're so panicked, it doesn't occur to you that it's going to be a scam, particularly if it's the actual voice of someone that you know. So she said, if you agree with your family, and maybe you know your parents as well, that there's a password that you use and before you do any thing you say, what's the password? If anything just seems confusing
or really highly charged and emotional in that moment. Now, Charlotte's moving on, and she continues to write prolifically. She's a beautiful writer. She has so many other things coming up. We've popped a link in our show notes so that you can follow her, because she is so much more than this story, just like we're all so much more
than the worst thing that's happened to us. The executive producer of No Filter is Niama Brown, and she and her husband are currently arguing about what the family password should be. Our audio production is by Leah paul Just. She doesn't have a family password either, but she and her partner will have one by the end of the day.
I'm Meya Friedman. We've had family passwords for years, but it was more when the kids were little and it was about, you know, there was that scam or that fear going round that someone would come up to your kid after school and say, Hey, your mom's in hospital. You need to come with me. She sent me to come and pick you up. So we had a password back then, but it hadn't occurred to me to have one now. But oh my goodness, guess what we're going
to be discussing over family dinner tonight. Go do it right now, and I'll see you next week.