Beware the New “You Better Stay on the Phone Scam”

Beware the New “You Better Stay on the Phone Scam”

There’s a new scam going around that demands victims stay on the phone or else they will be arrested or have their accounts seized.  And the sad part of this obvious scam is it is generating a lot of ill-gotten income for the scammers.

We want you to be safe. And to be safe you need to be informed. And the purpose of this article is to keep you informed about all the new scams making the rounds, including the new “You better stay on the phone” scam. 

The following article appeared in the Detroit Free Press newspaper on July 28, 2020. We’re sharing it with you to keep you informed so you won’t fall for this scam and the other scams revealed in the article. 

New scam demands victims stay on the phone: Here’s how it works

Susan Tompor
Detroit Free Press
Jul 28, 2020

Red flags of a scam tend to be similar. The scammer will try new tricks but typically create a sense of urgency, either playing into our fear, greed or desire to be loved. They’ll romance us, threaten us, frighten us, pretend to offer a quick fix to a problem we didn’t even know we had.

And now, increasingly, they’re demanding that victims stay on the phone as long as possible while consumers head to the bank or the grocery store to carry out demands for money via money transfers or gift cards.

Scammers are telling their victims that that(sic) if they hang up, they’re likely to be arrested immediately or have their accounts seized.

‘This is an alarming development because consumers are essentially being held captive in the scam,” according to a new 2019 Consumer Complaint Survey released by the Consumer Federation of America on Monday.

‘If bank tellers question them about withdrawing the money, the scammers are right there, in the consumers’ ears, to suggest how to respond to prevent the tellers from becoming suspicious.’

Consumer Federation of America each year surveys watchdog agencies across the country and 31 agencies from 20 states participated to give a snapshot of scams and consumer problems.

The new COVID-19 scams — such as a warning about phony contact tracing outfits asking for your credit card information — will show up in the 2020 survey. Even so, the report took time to note that the pandemic has spurred complaints involving “price-gouging, refunds for canceled events and travel, nondelivery of orders from closed vendors, and COVID-related scams.”

Gift cards are almost as good as cash for scammers. Anyone who demands payment by gift card is always a scammer, according to the FTC.

In 2019, the top three fastest growing complaints involved fraud, medical billing and Internet sales. Consumers continue to complain about failure to deliver online purchases.

Other noteworthy warnings, according to the report included:

Fake claims on student loans. Student loan problems, as reported to Maryland Attorney General’s Office, involved loans to attend for-profit schools. Students were misled concerning their ability to get a job once their education was complete. In one complaint, the student was told that loans were discharged, so he no longer had to make payments, but one of the loan companies continued to bill him for $116 per month for more than a year.

Tech support scams. Consumers reported seeing a “pop-up” on a (sic) their computers warning that their computer was infected with a virus. The Ohio Attorney General’s Office sued Support By Experts, LLC and Real Tech Experts, LLC last year.

When consumers responded to those pop-ups, they were told they needed to pay hundreds of dollars for a product to cure the problem. ‘In fact, there was no virus and the product was worthless,’ the report stated.

A ‘diet program’ that ate into savings accounts. An Arkansas man enrolled in a diet program and signed up for auto delivery. After one month, though, he tried to cancel and discovered that the payment for the second month had already been taken out.

The business promised to give him a refund but he never received it. After complaining to the Arkansas Attorney General’s Office, he received a refund of $271.76 that covered both months.

Scammers call your mother first. Now the con artists attempt to sound more believable by calling one of your relatives first to track you down, according to Sheryl Harris, director of the Cuyahoga County, Ohio, Department of Consumer Affairs.

‘If you get a message from your mom that you’re in trouble with the law, you’re going to believe it,’  Harris said in a news briefing Monday.

Con artists also will use real names of local officers, she said, so that the name will pop up when you Google it.

In some cases, consumers might lose thousands of dollars in an effort to clear up their name.

In reality, no court official is going to demand payment or personal information over the phone or threaten arrest for missing jury duty or other phony offenses.

The sweetheart swindle. An elderly woman in North Carolina lost $46,110 to a scammer claiming to be “an orthopedic doctor working on an oil rig in Russia.”

The so-called love connection was made via phone, LinkedIn, text message and email. The scammer told the victim that he was coming to marry her, but he never showed up. In 2019, the North Carolina Attorney General’s Office received 60 complaints about romance fraud, with 46 victims collectively losing more than $1.4 million.

Sweepstakes fraud triggers huge losses. Another woman in North Carolina was tricked into believing she won $3.5 million from scammers pretending to be from Publishers Clearing House.

She lost $220,000 to the scammers running that sweepstakes fraud over a year. At one point, she paid $30,000 in cash to someone she met at a Wendy’s restaurant, according to state regulators. North Carolina reported that 69 victims lost more than $2.3 million to sweepstakes scams last year.

The ‘Chinese Embassy Telephone Scam.’ Victims in California received prerecorded messages in Mandarin that appeared to be from the Chinese Embassy.

‘The scammer asks victims for personal information, including where in China their families are from and their immigration status,’ according to consumer watchdogs. Supposedly, the families are involved in a major fraud investigation in China and they are wanted for questioning.

Some victims “emptied their savings accounts, mortgaged their homes, or borrowed heavily to wire money to Hong Kong, from which it went into several accounts in mainland China.” Two agency investigators in the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office, both fluent in Chinese, were able to track the money and coordinate with law enforcement authorities in Hong Kong and China to return several hundred thousand dollars to victims in the San Francisco Bay area.

Source: Detroit Free Press