Your phone, your mailbox, your e-mail inbox, your television—tricksters have more ways than ever to con you out of your money.
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Old scams never die. Take Japan’s ore–ore sagi (the “it’s me–it’s me” scam). A crook calls a phone number, and if the person who answers sounds elderly or vulnerable, he says, “Ore, ore!” If the victim responds with: “Son, what’s wrong? You sound terrible!” the fraudster gives a sob story about how he was robbed or in a car wreck, then asks for money. Today, the ore-ore has migrated to cyberspace: A scammer hacks into someone’s Facebook account and sends out a plea for help to his or her contact list. It happened to Jayne Schermann of Cape Girardeau, Missouri, in August 2009. She received an urgent Facebook message from her friend Grace, who said she’d been robbed at gunpoint in London and couldn’t make it home. Schermann wired $4,000 to “Grace.” Meanwhile, safe at home, the real Grace discovered that a hacker was impersonating her on Facebook. She sent out warnings to her friends, but it was too late for Schermann to get her money back.
It’s no fun being in debt, but at least no one threatens to send you to prison…unless they’re scamming you. In 2009 a young Maryland couple who had defaulted on a loan several years earlier started receiving threatening phone calls: “This is the sheriff’s office. If you want to stay out of prison, pay up your old debts now.” But the calls weren’t from the police; they were from Final Claims Asset Locators, a Buffalo, New York, company owned by Tobias Boyland, a career criminal who’d spent 13 years in prison for armed robbery and drug dealing. Posing as cops or debt collectors, Boyland’s employees would phone people at random and tell them that they were investigating an old debt. They’d mention a fake bank, tell the victim the amount of the “debt,” and would offer to settle at a lower rate if the customer would pay up immediately. In June 2009, Boyland received a visit from a real cop and was arrested. According to New York’s Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, “Boyland’s lies and intimidation caused many innocent people to pay money they didn’t owe just to stop the terrifying calls.” If convicted, Boyland and 12 of his associates face lengthy prison terms.
Virginia, Wisconsin, and Minnesota all have statues they claim is the “World’s Largest Loon.” (The “Big Loon” in Vergas, Minnesota, is actually the largest.)
In 2009 two con men swindled three Australian businesses out of a total of $143,000 by convincing them that they could duplicate banknotes. After establishing a friendship with the victims, the scammers would place a $100 bill between two sheets of a “special material” and then pour a “special liquid” over it. When the sheets were opened, presto—there were two $100 bills inside instead of one. (Actually, they used simple sleight-of-hand tricks to sneak in a second bill.) The amazed victims gave the men thousands in cash, which the fraudsters took for “processing,” promising to double it. They returned later with a foil-wrapped package, insisting that it shouldn’t be opened for 24 hours while the chemicals finished the duplicating process. When the victims opened the package, there was only blank paper inside. Investigators haven’t caught the pair yet, but they’ve determined that the “special liquid” consists of hair spray, bleach, and baby powder.
In 2009 a movie enthusiast in Oregon placed a bid on eBay for a rare Marx Brothers movie poster. Someone else outbid him, but soon after, he received an e-mail saying that he could get the same poster at a much lower price through another source. The bidder smelled a rat, did some checking, and found that this was a long-standing scam that originated in the small town of Dragasani, Romania. Fraudsters there (mostly young men with formidable computer skills) have set up thousands of bogus online auctions for everything from memorabilia to electronics to MiG fighter jets, and the “winning” bidders are instructed to pay through unrecoverable methods like Western Union. In 2008 Dragasani’s mayor, Gheorghe Iordache, bragged to London’s Sunday Times that the fraudsters have brought a lot of money to the poverty-stricken town. “I’ve heard about local guys who have BMWs, Mercedes, Porsches—and they don’t even work!” The mayor said that the scammers even put Dragasani’s town hall up for auction. And where do most of their “buyers” come from? “They’re mainly Americans because they’re on the Internet most often and they’re naïve.”