Brand new scam. The scamster gets all your personal info. All. He calls your Bank or CU pretending to be you, and transfers all your Line to your regular account. He then orders a wire for slightly under that sent to his confederate, who has an account at another FI.
What makes this scam so good is that they even put in a remote call forwarding order on your home phone, so when the Bank calls to confirm, they are talking to the scamster. :eek:
They also will have a reasonable copy of your sig and even your handwriting. They will be able to answer every security question.
If you have a Home Equity Line of Credit, call your bank or CU and tell them that under no circumstances are wires allowed from your account without you being there in person.
This just hit, around 20 + dudes have been hit, each for around $100K, mostly through Credit Unions.
Mods, feel free to move this.
Members, feel free to tell others about this on other MB, etc- in your own words.
Since you posted this in GQ but didn’t ask any questions at all, I will. Can you provide a cite or any sort of article or documentation of this happening anywhere?
Dewey, we don’t know yet. A WAG is some sort of spyware and Banking at Home? It is known that the scamsters are getting much of their info from Public Records when the new mortgage, etc is recorded.
Santo- if you have a Home Equity Line of Credit, just call/email your FI and say "No wire transfers out of any of my accounts without my in-person, at a branch, approval. " No big deal.
Oddly, so far the scamsters do not seem to be doing any of the other things one could do with a stolen identity. But, they did just steal $100K from just one account, so maybe that’s enough.
Oh, and while we are on it, if you have a CC company that keeps sending you those CC advance conveince checks, ask them to stop it. Unless you request them, of course.
I’m also a bit hazy on how this is any much different than the scams and frauds that are already going on.
There’s some info from the Feds about a “voice broadcasting” scheme that appears to trace back to Romania, but it appears to be nothing more than phishing by voicemail, rather than email - automated phone calls go out saying the marks’ accounts had been disabled and to call the bank at some special account reactivation number that obviously went somewhere other than to the bank. Possibly the only unusual thing about this is the use of phone calls instead of email.
Also on the wire today is a tale of a job seeker in Colorado that fell into a 419 scam with unsolicited travelers checks. Absolutely nothing novel or unusual about this - must be a slow news day for them to even publish this.
