Of course I was blindsided. Isn’t that always the case?
The short of it:
I gave the scammer my first and last name, which as a combination is fairly uncommon. They had dialed my mom’s phone. These scammers now have my mom’s name, my name, our relationship, and her phone number— probably her address. Is Mom more or less likely to get hit up again?
On the plus side, she refused to give any account information whatsoever. On the minus side we did verify name and phone number and provided my name and relationship.
**
Particulars for those who might be interested:**
I live next to my mom who turns 80 this year. 20 minutes ago Mom sent my younger brother (who has Downs Syndrome) to get me. He said, “Mother wants you about the phone call. It’s very important.”
So I went over to Mom’s. When I walked in, She was speaking into the phone, “Here’s my son. I want you to tell him exactly what you’ve told me.” She handed me the phone.
I said, “Hello.” And of course the first thing out of the caller’s mouth was, “Who am I speaking with?”
I identified myself and asked who I was speaking with.
She said, “Rosa from National Medical out of NY” in some sort of SE Asian accent.
It was clearly a scam. She wanted Mom’s bank account numbers and credit card numbers to enroll her in a Medicare program. . . . blah, blah, blah, blah.
I tried to bluff her by saying we were tracing the call. But she didn’t fall for it. Which left me a bit flustered. I know that was stupid. I’m not going to con the con. But I kept saying that I was going to keep her on the line until I called someone else on the other line. But she knew I didn’t know what I was doing. Because really, who do you call? What do you do? I was a bit surprised she didn’t hang-up on me, but maybe she thought that if she continued to hold that I would believe that she wasn’t a scammer. But she was correct in one thing, I wasn’t going to be able to figure out who to contact while on the phone and out of my element. So I hung up.
That’s it. If Mom had given me just the smallest heads up that she suspected the caller to be a scammer, I would have just said, “We don’t give out that information to unsolicited callers,” and terminated the call. But when you are embroiled in a conversation getting angrier knowing that this asshole is trying to steal from your mom, you start thinking, “Isn’t there something I can do to catch this crook?”