I had gotten a call near the end of the day at the mailroom that I was in charge of a few decades ago. The guy was excited to let me know that I had won a free cruise. Not only did I win a free cruise for two, but it covered all expenses including transportation to and from the port and a hotel stay. Plus, I was entered into a cash prize contest. There were people hooping and hollering in the background as he listed all the things that I had won… in the contest that I didn’t remember entering.
Yes, I had entered my name in a few local contests. “Win this car” sort of contests that were held at the mall just next door to my workplace, but I never put in for a free cruise.
But the cheers and exciting news didn’t stop. The guy continually rambled on about the things that I had won in this contest. Soon I was told that I had actually won not one but two all-expense-paid cruises! Isn’t it great? Isn’t it exciting? And all I needed to do was to pay a fee upfront, and could I please give them my credit card or bank account number so they can process this and I can go on my exciting cruise.
My mind started kicking in. Warning bells were ringing loudly in my head. If I truly won this contest, a contest that I did not remember entering and they wouldn’t say which one it was, then why did I need to pay them upfront for this “free” cruise? Plus, how did they get the mailroom number? In the contests that I had entered, I had never given them my work number. Ever! It was always the home number. I didn’t even have a cellphone at the time! (Yes, it was that long ago.)
I knew it was a scam. I told them no. I should have just hung up, but I was telling myself as well as them that I was refusing this “exciting” windfall. I needed to tell myself no as they still tried to get me to give them my financial information. I found out later that I was one of the lucky people who managed to avoid being scammed by this fast-talking phony contest crew.
That was almost three decades ago. I stopped entering into local contests afterward when I learned that con artists were using those “win this car” contests to get contact information. How they got my work number, though, remains a mystery because they somehow knew me by name the minute I picked up the phone.
A few weeks prior to this column posting, a close family member had told me that they had gotten a call from their TV service provider with a great deal for them, and she wanted my input on it. It was a two-year program to get all the premium movie channels for just $99 a month. All this person had to do was to pay $300 for the first three months and then the rest of the two years will be $99 a month, and she’d have all the premium channels.
Something wasn’t right about it. I was hesitant to tell her to go ahead, but she really thought it was a great deal for her. She really wanted this.
The next day I asked her if the $300 would be taken out of her monthly bill or if they wanted the money upfront. She texted back around lunchtime to tell me that they wanted to be paid in eBay gift cards, and she was planning on going to the nearest Dollar General store to buy them.
Those same alarm bells were ringing loudly in my head. I immediately got on the phone with her and told her that this was a scam and to not do it. She said that it was okay, that this was a special promotional program with her TV service and eBay. She even talked to their billing people and they said it was legitimate and she got an email confirmation for proof. I told her to send me the email.
When I got home that afternoon, I went into overdrive. Oh the email looked legitimate. It had her quirky account name and the provider’s logo and a legitimate-looking verbiage. In addition to the “great deal” she was offered, they threw in a Visa gift card once the first transaction is completed. The warning bells in my head were ringing so loudly that I couldn’t hear anything my relative had to say. She was ready to go get those eBay gift cards and make this happen.
Most people don’t know this, but I’m an old school netizen from the days before the World Wide Web. I had taught myself to spot scams and spam by looking at the raw data of the messages. Stuff that you don’t normally see from your email program like Outlook or Thunderbird or Gmail. Each email has a header code that traces the message back from its point of origin through all the various servers to its final destination. You could lie about the “sender”, but you could not lie about that header code.
If the confirmation email was from the TV provider, then that would be the first address in the header code. It wasn’t. I traced it to a European remailer service notorious for spammers. There was no trace of the provider’s address at all in the message. I then had her send me an email from her last billing statement. I traced the header of that email back to the provider. I told her the “confirmation” email was a scam. She didn’t believe me. I did a WHOIS search on the address of the sender. Again, something most people wouldn’t know to do. It wasn’t registered by either the provider or eBay. She still didn’t want to believe me. She finally got online with the customer service department of the provider. They had confirmed what I was telling her. The “salesman” didn’t exist. The “promotion department” that she was supposedly communicating with didn’t exist. It wasn’t real. There was no “promotional deal”. It was a scam.
I had saved this family member from losing at least $300 to a con.
Prior to this, I had searched the offer on my smartphone. It took me all of fifteen seconds on Google for me to see that it was a scam that was sweeping the country. Two law enforcement agencies were investigating it. A regional Better Business Bureau was getting inundated with complaints. The provider itself was investigating it, although apparently not so hard because it’s at least two years old.
I had gotten permission to share this event to you provided that I didn’t say who she was or who the provider was. I can say that this family member that I had just stopped from being scammed is someone that I have always considered to be a sharp person. She’s always looking for a good deal. That’s why she thought this offer was legitimate. She really wanted it to be. She’s also a bit stubborn. I had to go above and beyond to prove to her that she was being scammed, because this is someone who really doesn’t like admitting she’s wrong about anything.
Sadly, she’s not the only one.
Con artists on all levels are able to pilfer people out of their money because they promise something that their victims want. A great deal, a great financial program, a timeshare, an extended car warrantee, a robust retirement program… they don’t promise the moon, but they will offer up just enough to make you want it to be true.
I keep telling people to watch the CNBC series “American Greed”, which talks about various cons and con-artists and other kinds of criminals that defraud us on all levels. We’re taking “get rich quick” people, corrupt politicians, abusive corporate executives, so-called “financial advisors” and “brokers”, liars and thieves all around, and, yes, that list will someday include the current President of the United States.
If you watch the series enough times and you see the various forms of con games going on, you can see a pattern. You see what they offer and understand that it’s not legitimate. You also see the people who fall victim to these cons. They are not idiots. They aren’t generally gullible or naïve. Only a few of them are feeble-mined or addled with age. They’re basically like us. They are the people that we work with, the people that we go to church with, the people that we see at the gym or the local grocery store. They are our neighbors and our friends and our relatives, and even ourselves under any other circumstance.
And I’m not going to say that I’m special or immune to these things. I’ve had my share of falling for cons as well, only mine often involve more matters of the heart (or matters related to it). Hell, I only knew that the gift card thing was a scam because it had been played so many other times by fake utility bill collectors and fake jury duty callers. It’s been all over the TV and online. It was the same kind of con with just a different twist. Instead of using fear, they dangled an offer that they knew their victims would want. After all, who wouldn’t want to get something far more for seemingly less money?
There is a simple secret to how these con artists are able to get to us: they tell us something that we want to hear or something that we want to believe is real. That’s it. That is all that it takes.
Let’s get brutally honest here… we want to believe that there is a secret to wealth. That we can make a lot of money in a short period of time without living like a hermit. That we can build up a retirement fund or a collage tuition fund or whatever kind of fund while still keeping up with the Joneses. That we can make a fortune in the stock market in just a few days. That we can somehow get the most of a program or service for the least amount of money. That there is a shortcut to getting into the college or university of our choice. That a TV personality who couldn’t even manage a casino without it going bankrupt could somehow govern a nation, reverse a supermassive budget debt, provide superior healthcare, correct a trade imbalance, and also get a massive ocean-to-ocean border wall built and have Mexico pay for it. That the good-looking girl… or guy… is really interested in us and not in the money that we provide. (See? I told you that I’m not immune to this.)
We really *want* to believe these things to be true.
It’s just that… they’re often not.
That’s why it’s up to us to remember that. And why we have to be looking out for these cons and their false promises.
A true promotions department will not specifically call you first. You have to contact them. They really don’t want to give away things for free or at a discount unless they have to. They also will not ask that you pay for something with a third-party gift card, especially something that can leave no traceability and cannot be reversed once given out. It’s one thing to use gift cards for your own use, like to pay for a subscription to Netflix or Hulu. It is another to be convinced to pay a bill or to bail someone out using it, especially if the person insisting on it claims to be a police officer or clerk of court. The person insisting on it is looking for something they can cash in fast and have no record. That’s not how utility services or government entities operate.
We want to believe that people are honest and legitimate and upfront. And some people are. We just have to make sure not to fall into the schemes of the ones who aren’t.
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