According to the FCC, in 2020 victims lost more than $304 million from being swindled by a cyber sweetheart. Tune in to this week’s edition of Money, I’m Home as Consumers Fraud Specialist talks about Romance Fraud.

 

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0:00:03.6 Lynne Jarman-Johnson (LJJ): Money, I’m home, welcome in everyone, I’m Lynne Jarman-Johnson with Consumers Credit Union. And from finance to fitness, we have it all. And we are always so excited when Kristy Desimone stops by, she is our senior fraud specialist here at Consumers Credit Union. And I’ll tell you, fraud is something that we take very seriously, especially with digital stuff happening so much across the world. Let me give you a stat here, according to the FTC, Kristy, and I’ll see, tell me if you know this or not. Well, you probably do, but you probably know it in a way that is like, holy cow. To me, it’s kind of scary. There’s reports of online scams that have nearly tripled in the past years, now listen to this, in 2020 alone, victims lost $304 million from being swindled by a cyber sweetheart. A cyber sweetheart. Kristy, you call this romance scams. Tell us a little bit about it.

0:01:07.6 Kristy Desimone (KD): Romance scams are unique because it’s a long-term scam, a lot of the times. People build relationships with someone over an internet dating site or just a social media platform and can spend six months to a year getting to know someone, and then they scam you or ask to use your accounts or deposit fraud checks with you, and long-term scams people invest a huge amount of time and energy, and because it’s such a long-term scam, they are scared to come and talk about it, or it’s hard to believe that the person is trying to take advantage of them.

0:01:41.2 LJJ: You mentioned dating sites. And you can understand how that could happen. Is it really any social media that you might be on, someone might direct message you, send you a note that is just tell you, “Hey, hope you’re having a great day,” and then you just start this back and forth interaction?

0:02:00.9 KD: Right. And it can be a variety of relationships, it’s not always like a significant other, sometimes people have family members who come through a Facebook or an Instagram that then ask them for money months down the road, and they learn that information that it wouldn’t be out of the ordinary, because we put so much on social media that they’re able to kind of do some research before they approach a person.

0:02:24.3 LJJ: And so, it’s interesting to me, most of the time, these scammers, they don’t live anywhere near you, right?

0:02:31.2 KD Correct!

0:02:31.7 LJJ: But they can fake it. Can’t they? If they find out all the information about you, just start like throwing information to you that’s comfortable for you, even though it’s not true.

0:02:43.9 KD: Right, and it makes your guard go down. So you’re like, Hey, this person knows my favorite place to go downtown, Kalamazoo, they have to be here. But in reality, they could just be there in California. Sometimes we see it overseas, and that too can be hard for someone to understand when they’re like, “But they knew so much about the area that I live in that I felt so comfortable giving them information.”

0:03:08.2 LJJ: So, what is it that we need to make sure that we look for or even listen for, when all of a sudden these start to happen? Have you actually seen members where this has happened to locally?

0:03:20.8 KD: Unfortunately, yes, especially with the pandemic and how we became so isolated, members reached out any way they could to feel like they had someone that was going through the same thing they were. And it turned out to be kind of a huge scam when they started to use unemployment funds for these romance scams. So, what they would do is they would say, “Hey, my unemployment, I don’t have a bank account. Can I use yours to have that deposited?” You can just withdraw the funds and mail them to me, and we would see unemployment deposits come in with multiple people’s names on it, because the information had been stolen and they were using it to deposit it and then get it out of the accounts immediately.

0:04:08.1 LJJ: Wow. Wow. You know when that happens, I’m sure many people, like you said, they don’t want to talk about it because they think “What? How could that have happened to me?” but this is really something that is going on right now. And don’t be ashamed of it.

0:04:21.7 KD: Right, and it’s very common, which I know sounds terrible, I’m like, Oh, it’s a common scam, but it happens to a lot of individuals, and it’s almost like a community of individuals, if you find other people that I have fallen. Or if we say, “Hey, we’ve seen this before. It’s Okay, let’s help you get through this.” You’re not alone in these situations, and I think that’s important to remember is that Consumers doesn’t want you to feel isolated and alone. We’re here to help you solve these issues, and when someone asks for your online banking information or account information, because they’re not able to get accounts of their own somewhere, we want you to feel comfortable coming to us and saying, “Hey, is this legitimate? Have you guys heard of this scam before?” Like, talk to us about it so we can get in front of it.

0:05:08.8 LJJ: I think that some of the things with the romance scam that I read about are a couple of, I think really important ones, and whether it’s a romance scam or not, the authenticity of an individual and finding out who they are, you know… One of the things that I read is that you can actually do some of reverse snooping, so let’s say you’re watching something comes ahead, across and they send a picture, you can find out if that picture is a real picture, like a stock photo, as they say.

0:05:37.0 KD: Right, yeah.

0:05:39.6 LJJ: How important is that to really do your own digging, too? Don’t just fall into the trap of thinking, it’s real.

0:05:46.5 KD: It’s so important, and I think back to… There’s this show called Catfish, and they show you those techniques where you can reverse image search and you can see what kind of friends they have on their social media platforms. Is it a lot of people that don’t seem to make sense for what they’re telling you, that kind of stuff. So yes, there are tons of resources out there to help you investigate, and it’s okay to do that. You are putting your trust in someone, and we want to make sure that they’re educated decisions by doing some research on your own.

0:06:18.5 LJJ: Do you think of red flag hits Kristy, when the minute they start asking you for money, should that be a red flag automatically?

0:06:26.9 KD: Automatically. It’s because especially a lot of times we see people haven’t even FaceTimed with them or their camera never works or they can never meet you, and in those instances, those coupled with the fact that they’re asking you for money are huge red flags that should make you pause and stop for a second and say, “Hey, do I really know this person? If I saw them walking down the street, would I even recognize them?” Kind of deal, so making sure that you stop at those red flags.

0:06:54.4 LJJ: You mentioned those red flags, Kristy, tell us about the red flags that you have talked to members about to say, “Hey, this is what you can look for romance scams.”

0:07:04.4 KD: Of course, so any time that they ask for your online banking username and password, any time that they ask you… If you can help them by letting them use your account, any time they say, “Hey, send me a couple hundred dollars, I need to do this,” those are red flags, but also it starts with, are their conversations always seem to be curtailed to what you’re interested in? Have they really talked about who they are and really expose them as well as you exposing yourself by giving information out any time they ask for any information of yours. That’s a huge red flag.

0:07:43.6 LJJ: So, you have talked talk about this before, but it seems like this also is included in these romance scams, is this gift card, I’ll go open up some gift cards for me. That seems to be a part of this, too?

0:07:55.8 KD: Yeah, and gift cards are probably the hardest part because once that gift card information is given to someone, there aren’t ways to recoup those funds. Basically, you’re just left with this piece of plastic, and now you’re like, “What am I supposed to do?” And it really puts you… It puts the member in a bind, so any time a gift card is involved, no matter what it is, it’s always a huge red flag to stop, pause and think about the activity. If you’re having to go to multiple stores to get multiple gift cards, that should cause you to pause for a second and say, “Hey, is this normal activity? Is this something I should be doing? Or should I contact Consumers and say, Hey, have you guys heard of this before?”

0:08:38.3 LJJ: And finally, Kristy, you just mentioned it and hit the nail on the head, Consumers is here, whether you walk into any office or pick the phone up or send us information through our social channels to help you. Tell us how important that is to reach out before it’s too late.

0:08:55.3 KD: Right. I can’t stress you’re not alone. We are proud of our members, we love our members, and we’re here to help our members. So, at any point in time, if you’re like, I don’t feel good about something, trust that gut instinct and reach out to us, stop in, get a cup of coffee with us and talk to us about what’s going on so that we can get ahead of it before it becomes a huge loss.

0:09:16.7 LJJ: And we have great coffee, Kristy.

0:09:18.5 KD: The best coffee.

0:09:22.7 LJJ: Hey, thank you so much, Kristy. Next time we’re going to be talking about all things checks, checking 101, which really I think is going to be awesome because people really… I even forget, you know, people think about a check, well a check is also a debit card, right? We’re going to have some fun.

0:09:36.9 KD: Right.

0:09:37.4 LJJ: Alright. Yay. Thank you so much.

0:09:40.8 KD: Bye.

0:09:42.1 LJJ: I’m Lynne Jarman-Johnson with Consumers Credit Union, Money, I’m Home, thank you for joining us. If you have a topic you’d like to share, just send it our way, thanks, Jake Esselink for your awesome production skills, hope everyone has an awesome week and stay safe. Don’t get into any of those romance scams. Let’s have a safe week.

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