They Were ‘Calling to Help.’ Then They Stole Thousands
Credit to Author: Becca Andrews| Date: Thu, 03 Feb 2022 11:00:00 +0000
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One December morning, my mother’s phone rang. She tugged the iPhone from the holster she kept clipped to the waist of her blue jeans and wondered who might be calling. Perhaps someone from church was checking in on her recovery from the coronavirus. “Hello?” she said.
The voice that greeted her was masculine. The caller sounded concerned, and he told her something was wrong with her Amazon account. “Someone has access to your bank accounts through Amazon, and they can take all your money. I’m calling to help.” Her mind raced. Oh Lord, she prayed silently, Oh Lord, give me strength. The voice was warm and reassuring, and my mom tried to focus closely on his words. My dad was driving to work in his truck, and she was home alone. She had been cooped up in the house for weeks with Covid, isolated from her community, and she missed the balm of a friendly voice.
She tried to steady herself. The man said he needed information to make sure the money was safe. He transferred her to a different male voice—again soothing, reassuring, calm. She promised not to hang up. A brain injury decades earlier made it hard for her to follow his instructions, but she stuck with it. The voice explained slowly, carefully, how to swipe and tap her phone until she had installed an app that allowed him to see what was happening on her screen. Now he followed her every move.
After some hours, she mentioned she had to relieve herself. “It’s OK, I’ll stay on the line,” he said. She parked the phone outside the bathroom and picked it back up when she was done. As noon approached, she told him, “I have to eat.” “I’ll wait, it’s OK. Don’t hang up, we’ll lose all our progress.” She set the phone down on the counter to make a sandwich, then pulled some chips from a cabinet and padded over to the kitchen table.
The phone buzzed with a text—it was my father, checking in. She typed back that there was a problem, but she was fixing it, she had it all taken care of. She tapped the tiny white arrow next to the message field to send her reply, and then she heard the voice, its volume elevated. It sounded angry. She frowned and brought the phone back up to her ear. “Why would you do that? You can’t tell anyone! What if he’s in on it?” She felt confused. That didn’t make any sense. But she also didn’t fully trust herself. She was worn out from her slow recovery, and the steroids she was taking as treatment gave her a hollow buzz of energy.
A 20-minute drive away, my dad sat at his bare desk under a harsh LED light in the office of an automotive manufacturing plant. Reading her message, he felt a prickle of anxiety. But he, too, was on the mend from Covid, and his mind felt foggy. He had recently started a new job as a manager at the factory, and he was still figuring out his colleagues and their processes. He got another message, this one from a coworker, and he forgot about his wife’s text. He adjusted his mask and switched to composing an email he had been meaning to send.
At home, my mother dug out her worn, printed-out packet of passwords from a pile of books and old church bulletins on a side table and flipped through its curling pages. She returned to her chair in the kitchen and followed along as the man told her where to enter them. She tapped to install Cash App and opened up PayPal. She downloaded Coinbase. She set up Zelle so she could easily send money directly from her bank account. She didn’t recognize all the names, but she wrote down her new passwords in the margins of her document. As the afternoon wore on, she began wishing for a nap. “We’re almost done,” the man assured her. “He’s going to be home soon, my husband will be home soon,” she said.
She just wanted to be finished and then to never think about it again. The technology made her feel like she was fumbling in the dark, and she was reluctant to ask more questions. Outside, the sun had dipped well below the wooden fence surrounding the backyard, and the house had fallen into a gloom when the man finally ended the call. The phone felt warm in her hand as she shoved it back into its holster.
That night, when my father got home, he noticed right away that something was off. My mother was jittery and fussing with gadgets on the kitchen counters. Food sat out on the stove, and he was hungry, but he suddenly remembered the text from earlier. “What happened today?” he asked. She shook her head. “You don’t need to do anything, I got it all taken care of,” she said.
“Got what taken care of?”
“I’m not supposed to tell you.”
My mother thought she had labored for hours doing what was necessary to protect herself and her family. Instead, the scammer had siphoned away all of her personal information—her social security number, date of birth, driver’s license number—and about $11,000. The new financial apps she’d installed were all portals through which more of my parents’ money could flow into strangers’ hands.
In the next months, my father and I tried the best we could to undo the damage. It was a frustrating journey. Getting scammed was dehumanizing on its own, but so were the hours spent begging customer service people for help. I pleaded. I raged. I started to wish the app companies could take a page from our scammer. Because where he had come across as friendly and reassuring, I got chilly half-replies, or just as often, silence. By the end, all I wanted was for someone to show some empathy—to say, perhaps, “I’m calling to help. It’s OK. We’re almost done. I’ll stay with you till we’re done.”
My parents were college sweethearts who met outside the mechanical engineering building at Mississippi State University in Starkville. At the time, my mother was recovering from a traumatic car crash that left her with frequent partial seizures, which made it harder for her to study. But she managed to become one of the rare women to graduate with a civil engineering degree, and as she likes to tell me now, the only one in her surveying class who didn’t chew tobacco. A year later, my dad graduated and joined the Navy as a mechanical engineer, and they got married.
After that, my mom’s seizures began to worsen. When they moved to a base in Tennessee, the state denied her a driver’s license, and she was devastated. She visited doctors and underwent extensive testing. The physicians gave her two choices. She could take a medication to help control the seizures, but she would still be unable to drive. Or she could undergo a risky surgery to remove the scar tissue on her brain and, with luck, end the seizures. Once my little sister and I were born, she realized she desperately needed to be able to drive. She got the surgery.
Her recovery was tough. She ping-ponged between unspeakable fury and unstoppable tears. Her short-term memory was unreliable, and she had a hard time with text. At bedtime she liked to read me stories from Alice in Bibleland, but she often stumbled on the words and glared at them in frustration. When she got stuck on a page, I would pick up where she left off and tell the tale from memory, hoping to soothe her.
After about a year, she recovered, and her life went back to normal. But as more time passed, I again noticed her struggling with basic tasks. She became overwhelmed fixing meals that once were routine and got angry when she forgot where she had placed her keys. Ever since then, I have felt a responsibility to protect my mother from what my dad calls “two-legged monsters”—people who can sniff out weakness and prey on her friendly, open nature.
The evening of the phone call, my father again asked my mother about her text message, and the story spilled out. His stomach in knots, he swept past the food on the stove to the living room to grab his iPad. He sank into his creaky recliner and pulled up their USAA bank accounts. He could see the withdrawals: $10,000 to Coinbase, $999 to Zelle, $70 to Cash App. For some reason—perhaps to cause confusion—$2,000 had been moved from their savings account to a credit union they used. He felt queasy.
He phoned USAA and spent the next hours on the line with the bank. My mother, agitated, perched on the armrest beside him, trying to recall her conversations with the scammers. “I can’t remember. I don’t know what to do,” she said repeatedly, straightening to walk a few paces and then collapsing into her own recliner a few feet away. Then she’d spring to her feet again and peer over his shoulder. The USAA representative helped them to deactivate Zelle but did nothing about the $999 transferred through it.
When the call ended, my parents huddled around her phone and thumbed through the unfamiliar payment apps. They eventually zeroed in on changing their passwords. They turned to the password packet, but neither she nor my dad could decipher her notes. “This was so stupid. I can’t believe I did this, so stupid,” she said, again and again. When my dad finally sat down to eat, he lifted his fork to his mouth without tasting much. That night, they barely slept.
The next day, during his lunch break, my father did what many parents with tech problems do. He called one of his children—me. I was on a work trip that kept me frantically busy, and I had just given in to the urge to take a short nap. I had barely closed my eyes when the phone rang. “Hello!” he said, his voice uncannily chipper. “Hi,” I answered cautiously. “What’s wrong?”
“I just need to talk this through and figure out how to handle this,” my dad said. I kicked the covers off and sat up straight. His voice dropped down a half octave as he abandoned his cheery tone and gave me the basic outline. His lunch break was ending soon, so we agreed to continue the conversation later. Feeling antsy, I poured myself a glass of water and paced around my Airbnb, thinking. Then I sat down at my laptop and started to type.
“Some privacy thoughts,” I wrote to my dad. “Now they have y’all’s address. Make sure she knows not to open the door for anyone she doesn’t know.” I ticked off more items: Contact Experian, the credit monitoring agency; shut down the accounts for the apps she’d installed; contact the IRS in case of identity theft.
That night, after work, my dad called back, and together we set up fraud alerts through Experian. My father texted me the password to my mom’s PayPal account, and I managed to shut it down. He got back on the line with USAA, and that night—fortunately—learned he could recoup nearly $10,000.
The relief was hollow. We still felt exposed. I hadn’t closed all the accounts yet, and we weren’t sure if the scammers could still see everything my mother typed into her phone. She still spends her days home alone. They could easily call back. My father, utterly worn out, said he couldn’t do any more that night. We hung up.
The next day, around noon, I finally called my mother to ask for her version of the events. Her reply was simple, and the pain behind her words was clear. “I did a stupid thing,” she said. “I’m so stupid.”
Her words rang in my head. Right then my mom needed a daughter, not a technical assistant. My mind jumped to skipping my flight home to California, renting a car, and rerouting to West Tennessee to reassure her in person. But I was due back at work, and I headed to the airport instead.
That day has become a clear demarcation in time for me. Sure, we got most of the money back. But I no longer trust that my parents are safe. That’s why, in the following year, I moved back to the South to be closer to home.
For weeks and months after the phone call, I sank into deeper and deeper rungs of customer service hell. The worst experience was trying to close my mom’s Cash App account. For a while, my correspondent at Cash App kept addressing me in emails as “Jenith,” which is neither my name nor my mother’s. No matter what I did, I couldn’t seem to get clear guidance. I emailed, I called, I was transferred to several agents, all of whom had different thoughts on the matter. One suggested I send documentation declaring my mother dead. Another advised gaining legal guardianship over her.
Cash App, for the record, is owned by Block, formerly Square, which is worth roughly $55 billion and is clearly not short on resources. I understand why they were reluctant to help—I was not, after all, my mother—but I grew increasingly frustrated at what seemed a superhuman lack of empathy.
Finally I tagged the company in an exasperated tweet. Such measures have always seemed tacky to me, like throwing a tantrum in public. But it worked—the company told me to send a DM with more details. That day I messaged back and forth with “Cash App Support,” and I rehashed all the things I’d already tried or been told. I was fully caffeinated and at the end of my rope, which meant my messages had some … personality. “I know this is not your fault,” I typed, “but it is really frustrating that there is not a better way to resolve this—I cannot be the first person to experience this.” Indeed, I was not: Several news outlets reported that in the first year of the pandemic, fraud-related complaints to the FTC against Cash App ballooned 427 percent. (Danika Owsley, a company spokesperson, says Cash App has since improved its fraud-detection capabilities.)
To my surprise, I got an acknowledgment: “We totally hear you and will do everything we can to help out here. If those steps don’t work, just let us know, and we’ll try other options here.” I felt a flicker of optimism—what a curious, enchanting thing, this glint of humanity on the other end.
That conversation guided me to do something I probably should have done months earlier, but didn’t think of in the anxiety of it all: download the app and sign in as my mother. The reason I couldn’t easily close the account, I came to realize, was that the scammer had left my mother with a negative balance of $20 and had also bought a small amount in bitcoin, which was still sitting in her account. The Cash App representative suggested I sell the bitcoin to pay off the negative balance and send whatever was left back to my mom’s bank, and then I could be free of the company. Sitting at my desk, I tapped the button to sell the bitcoin and used the proceeds to escape the Cash App universe.
“I cannot tell you what a relief this is,” I typed into my DM thread. “AHH! So happy to hear this, Becca!” my Cash App Support friend typed back. “Apologies for the stressful start there, but we’re so glad this has finally been resolved for you.”
Seated in my desk chair, I pushed back from my keyboard, slumped down, and let out a sound that I could not replicate now if I tried—a guttural sigh of long-simmering anxiety leaving my body. “I feel drunk,” I told my husband. “In a good way.” He laughed at me, and our dog wagged her tail. “Congrats, baby,” he said.
Three months. It had taken three months to close an account with a negative balance of $20.
I’m afraid of the future. My father is downright petrified by it. He has sweaty, terrifying nightmares in which he loses everything he has worked so hard to put away. He reads articles about hackers and digital security, but he doesn’t understand all of it, so he sends the links to me. When he was told to buy shirts for his work uniform through PayPal, he couldn’t bring himself to do it; I bought them for him. My dad, the bravest, smartest man I know, is scared of the internet. “It’s like they took my time and money just because they could,” he said to me. “They’ll never be held accountable, ever.”
(He’s right. Most scammers never get caught. Every now and then, the US Department of Justice issues a press release—“Owner and Operator of India-Based Call Centers Sentenced to Prison for Scamming US Victims out of Millions of Dollars” or “Eight Indicted in Nationwide Grandparent Fraud Scam.” They are the extreme exceptions.)
It’s very likely that my mother’s brain injury made her more vulnerable to predation. Studies have shown that those with mild cognitive impairment may be more susceptible to scams, particularly if they struggle with episodic memory (check) and perception speed (double check). But that doesn’t make her as exemplary as you might think. The aging process is not kind to most brains—shrinking the prefrontal cortex that helps orchestrate thoughts and weakening neural connections. Older adults, who have had more time to accumulate assets, also lose the most money to scammers. In 2020, the year of my mother’s incident, Americans overall lost at least $3.3 billion to fraud, and my mom was one of at least 2.2 million victims of similar heists. In this respect, my mother is in fact very normal.
But it’s the mental and emotional fallout that worries me now. Recently, I spoke with a private investigator, Carrie Kerskie, who works on internet fraud cases more extreme than what my family went through, though they often begin with a similar tactic. She tells me she’s seen clients who, like my mother, blame themselves and that the internalized shame can twist into something more sinister—paranoia, broken relationships, even suicide.
“Everyone thinks it’s just money,” she says. “It is huge psychologically, because people think, ‘I can’t believe I was so dumb. How did I fall for this?’” In Kerskie’s experience, victims become obsessed with worrying that the bad guys will show up at their door and try to hurt them. They can’t sleep. They stop eating. “A lot of times, they have to take time off work to try to recover from this, and then they lose their job,” Kerskie says. “It’s a horrible downward spiral.”
I flash back to my mother’s haunting words—“I did a stupid thing. I’m so stupid.” Like so many of us, she assumed a scam is something aimed at the gullible, something to have “fallen for” rather than a crime with a victim and a perpetrator. “She didn’t ‘fall for it,’” Kerskie says firmly. “She was manipulated.”
After I moved back to the South—into an apartment a two-hour drive from my parents’ home—I made a quick trip out to see them. I was helping them sort through the affairs of my recently deceased uncle, precisely the sort of thing I had come back to do. While we were digging through stacks of his papers, my dad mentioned, “You know, another scammer called your mama.” My head snapped up. “She did the right thing, though,” he said. “She hung up on them and called me.”
I turned to look at my mother, who was at the kitchen table once again, updating the to-do list she uses to shore up her memory. She looked at me and we smiled at each other. These days, our conversations tend to be short. We rely on different languages to express our love.
I don’t know that she’ll hang up the next time a perpetrator dials her number. But as I watched her dig through a pile of her dead brother’s papers, I felt it deep in my bones, that the only way forward was together.
This article appears in the March 2022 issue. Subscribe now.
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