The wife was doing her monthly review of accounts and sees a withdrawal on our checking account of over $16K. Some miserable fuckwad somehow got our account number, created a forged check with all the account data on the bottom, and wrote a check to himself on our account. Sorry cocksucker. Wife’s on the phone right now with the bank’s fraud department. I’m sure they’ll make it good, but I suspect we’re going to have to go through the pain of them closing the account and opening a new account, getting new checks, etc. Merry fucking Christmas you fucking asshole, and rot in hell.
We lost our new rescue mutt on Christmas eve. Posted on all the channels, of course, including the local FB lost pets page. Scammers immediately–“I have your pet.” You couldn’t even take the time to determine what species it is? Fuckers. My standard response is “You know you’re scum and your Mom cries when she thinks of you, right?”
Almost every day now, I’m getting text messages saying I’ve a 10 yuan coupon that will expire soon and please click on this link.
Nope! The message does not have an expiration date for the coupon and, most telling, it does not have either a store name or even my name. You would think those would be the first things people would check. But evidently not. Scammers don’t do this crap because it doesn’t work.
I just got through this at work. Every morning the first thing I do is go through the bank account and match every check against the books. About a year ago, there was a check I didn’t recognize. It had all of our info on it, but it wasn’t our check stock. Someone had clearly used our info to print new checks. They were each for about $950. I went to the bank, got started on setting up a new account, but before we could migrate into it, another check came though for $4900. It was similar, but clearly made by someone different. This one also had our actual signature on the bottom. All the other ones were just a random name.
We finally moved into the new account and shut down the old one. A few weeks later, it happened again. 4 checks hit for a total of more than 11k (I should note the bank always returned the money). Again, same idea, but all made by different people. One of them didn’t even have a signature on the bottom. A number of them, instead of a signature were just the initials of the person they were made out to. For multiple reasons, we moved to a new bank after this.
The police weren’t all that interested. They took a report but clearly didn’t care. I didn’t even tell them about the last ones. We all know it’s not like the local, small town, PD are actually going to track down people cashing our checks all over the country, right.
Fast forward a few months and I get a call from a sheriff’s office in Texas (I’m in WI). A janitor at a college found a black and white printout of one of “our” checks in a dorm garbage in turned it into them. He found it odd enough to call me and see if it was legit (like maybe I had a kid at the college and mailed them a check). I don’t know if that went anywhere, but I put him in touch with my PD.
Then a few weeks later I got a call from the police in a neighboring city. A bank called them about someone that was “acting nervous”. At some point in the interaction between him and the police, they found pictures of “our” checks on his phone. When I brought them up to speed, they mentioned that he might have some ties with Texas.
They gave me his name and I’m currently watching his case, along with a few others, work their way through the court system.
Right now, however, I don’t know if the court cases are directly related to me. One of the officers along the way mentioned that he didn’t know if these would be prosecuted individually or if it was going to be combined with a bunch of other forgery charges he was facing for doing this to other businesses.
I really need to make a call and see what I can find out.
It really is absurd how easy it is to make your own checks. Any check you find has all the info you need.
Our bank shut down the checking account access and have turned things over to fraud. We had to go to a local PD to file a check fraud complaint, which will be sent to the bank along with a form they emailed to us. After that, we’ll be reimbursed for the theft. We have a Visa with this same bank that has been compromised at least three times now. Makes me suspect that perhaps there is someone at the bank who is selling information. I think we’re going to have to part company once the dust settles on all this.
Every time I reported these to the bank the first thing they did was blame me. They’d suggest that I probably lost some checks or maybe one of my employees stole them, not seeming to understand that these weren’t our checks, just our info on a fake check. The last time this happened, as soon as the banker started down that road, I stayed as restrained as I could but I felt like my face must have been turning red as I, as calmly, but sternly said “Stop blaming me for this, it was not my fault”. She insisted it was my fault and I insisted it’s the bank’s fault since they were the ones that accepted a check without an authorized signature (or any signature at all in one case).
At some point in our conversation she got back around to the topic of who has access to the checks and I told her “the only person with access to all our checks, from before and after the number was changed, and images of what our original checks would look like…is you”.
She wasn’t happy about that comment, but I didn’t care. She had been treating me like shit since I walked in and I was planning to close the account anyway.
I’m getting easily 15 scam emails a day trying to bilk me out of money.
I’m also getting 10-15 calls a week from callcenters in India trying to scam me by phone.
Today I got an email from a few Real companies that some Texas scumbag had applied to for ‘payday loans’ etc. I went to the web site for Cash Net USA & called their collections; they said they’d ony help me if I gave them my full SS#. I told them hell no, made sure the line was recorded, & explained that they are responsible for all losses due to that fraudster.
I then forwarded their email to their collections with a note saying the same thing.
Fucking Fraudsters…
Use of drones seems appropriate.
Most banks allow you to set up alerts, so the bank will email you when certain types of transactions occur. For example you could set up an alert so that you are notified every time there is a debit of more than $250 [or whatever] on your account. [the lower you set it the more scams you will catch, but also if you set it too low you will notified of too many transactions so you quit checking them out.]
So yesterday my mother-in-law had an issue with some random people banging on her neighbour’s door and becoming quite threatening (her neighbour is away at the moment and she lives alone). Apparently they had paid £300 for an iPhone and had been told to come there to collect it. It seems that a scammer (not her neighbour, someone completely unknown) has convinced them to pay for the phone and given a false address for collection. Absolute fuckers. But really, who sends £300 to someone they’ve never met, on the promise of collecting the goods later? Fools and their money…
UK scammers have to be a little more sophisticated as cheques are now a rarity.
From the reports I see, a common scam is to contact someone, pretending to be their bank’s fraud department, and tell them that they have been scammed. “All you need to do is to transfer all your savings to this ‘special’ account we have set up and not only will your money be safe, but we can trap the scammers,” they say. Sadly, and it’s usually the vulnerable who fall for this, they do as they are told and lose their nest egg.
People fall for emails, apparently from government organisations, requesting bank and other details so that they can apply for assistance (The £400 energy assistance scheme has been a popular target).
Another popular scam involves intercepting emailed invoices. They alter the payment details, so some unsuspecting householder transfers £thousands for their new kitchen, etc, and doesn’t find out until the supplier starts chasing them. By which time the cash is long gone.
In some cases, the bank will refund the money, but people are expected to take reasonable steps to protect themselves.
The “Bank Inspector” fraud has been alive and well for decades now, if not a century. Someone tried pulling this on my Grandma in the 1960’s and she told them to get bent.
Just last night we watched the Dragnet 1967 episode ‘The Bank Examiner Swindle’.
Friday and Gannon must stop two con men posing as bank examiners who are scamming the elderly out of their life savings.
In it, the fraudsters told elderly people that they suspect someone at the bank is stealing money. The victims were to withdraw their money and turn it over to the ‘bank examiners’, who made a show of marking each bill (so that they can determine the ‘thief’), and assured the victims that the police would return their money in a week.
About inside jobs from banks.
Many moons ago, I worked for a major bank in their credit card team. I was not on the phones.
One of the Customer Service Reps got caught filling out the form to add an authorized user to a caller’s account.
She was caught because she filled in her own name and address in order to receive the card.
An update on our problem. We got a copy of the police report and a notarized copy of the bank’s incident affidavit (per the bank’s request) and sent them off to the fraud department to get resolved. Should hopefully see repayment in the next couple of weeks. The popo investigation revealed, shockingly, that the address on the forged check doesn’t exist. We’re going to check with our bank(s) to see if we can set a limit on check amounts. The only time we write checks of any size is for charitable contributions at year’s end, so there is no reason to not have a limit.
I’ve told this story before, but: back in the early 1990s, I saw an allergist at a major medical center, including visits for allergy shots. Their billing department was effed up beyond belief - if they ever got a bill issued correctly, or a payment posted correctly, it was an accident.
I was on the phone with one of their staff once, and the conversation was something like this:
Him: “You paid that date by check”
Me: “No, I paid by credit card: I have the statement right in front of me.”. Then for some reason, I rambled “Because I’m in the middle of disputing a charge at Nordstrom, so I brought it with me to work to make a copy”>
Him: “Wait. Did you say NORDSTROM?? Someone from the office here was arrested last week for taking patient billing info, phoning in orders to Nordstrom, and having someone pick it up at the store!”.
He wound up referring me to the county police department that was investigating that case, and I forwarded them copies of the credit card statement. I never did hear what happened.
But yeah: someone with easy access to all the info a place needs for a phone order (name, account, expiration, ZIP code).
I had already filed a chargeback by then, and the charge was removed from my account. I remember being unsure about it, briefly, because I had in fact been to that mall another day that same week, but I knew I had not shopped at Nordstrom that day, and had never spent that much money (300 bucks or so) there on any one visit anyway.
I posted about this in last week’s MMP. The phone rang, and the TV said it was Fiserve. Usually we don’t answer the phone, but Fiserve is a company I know of through my job. I answered, and the recording said the call was for my wife, from on behalf of her credit card issuer. When my wife spoke to a person, she found out there was a flurry of declined charges on her card. She’d bought a new mattress from Matterss Depot the previous weekend, and that was the last thing she’d used the card for. She told the CSR that every/any charge after that was fraudulent. I have a feeling that the reason all of the attempted charges were declined because the fraudster didn’t have the three-digit security code from the back of the card.
I’m tempted to buy a sheet or something from Mattress Depot to see if my card gets compromised.
Apart from the usuals, I have been inundated with scam emails that look as if they are from Mcafee. I tried telling Outlook to reject them, but they seem to get around that.
When I bought my computer last year it came with Mcafee installed, but I deleted it, including all the references in the registry, so I know that none of these emails is of interest to me, so I simply delete them. What puzzles me is why they keep coming, and why so many - sometimes four or five a day?
That’s just normal spam. It gets mass mailed to everyone. I’ve never had McAfee on my computer yet I still get them.
What I’m puzzled by is that they arrive in bunches and are identical.