Cybercrime adds a new, very dangerous twist — face-to-face meetings

We often think of cybercrime as a long-distance nightmare.  A victim is manipulated by someone pretending to be a lover, or a boss, or a seller, and then sends that criminal money using some electronic, virtual method.  A really disturbing trend I’ve noticed recently is the increased frequency of in-person meetings as part of a cybercrime.  A criminal visits the victim to pick up cash, or even gold, at their home (like this story we did in March). A criminal sends an Uber delivery person to pick up a  “package” that contains fraudulent payments. A victim is lured into a meeting over a Facebook Marketplace purchase, then robbed. Or, in the case of this week’s Perfect Scam podcast, a con artist lurks at a “zone of trust” place like a golf course or a church looking for generous people to target with a charity scam.

This in-person meeting trend is alarming because a lot more things can go wrong when criminals are in the same physical space as their victims.  Earlier, I told you about the tragic story of an Ohio man who had been communicating with criminals attempting to commit a “grandparent scam”  and shot an Uber driver that he said he believed was part of the scam; he has been indicted for murder and pleaded not guilty. The driver, who died, was not a part of the scam.

Steve Baker, a longtime consumer advocate and former Federal Trade Commission lawyer, first pointed out this trend to me, and now I’m seeing it in many places. The Social Security Administration issued a dire-sounding warning a few weeks ago titled “Don’t Hand Off Cash to ‘Agents.’ ”   It reads:

“The Social Security Administration (SSA) Office of the Inspector General (OIG) is receiving alarming reports that criminals are impersonating SSA OIG agents and are requesting that their targets meet them in person to hand off cash. SSA OIG agents will never pick up money at your door or in any type of exchange. This is a SCAM!

NEVER exchange money or funds of any kind with any individual stating they are an SSA OIG agent. This new scam trend introduces an element of physical danger to scams that never existed before.

Meanwhile, police in New York are warning about a rise in crimes that begin as fake Facebook Marketplace ads — and end with victims staring down the barrel of a gun.

Why are cybercriminals getting this bold and meeting victims in person, or sending someone else to do that?  It’s too early to tell, but part of the reason *could* be increased transaction scrutiny at places like Zelle or cryptocurrency exchanges, along with increased fraud awareness around gift cards.  Time will tell.

In the meantime, I’m very concerned we will see more situations like that story from Ohio. Please be extra vigilant when speaking with loved ones about cybercrime.  Look and listen for signs of surprising new friends or unexpected meetings. Keep those lines of communication open.

Today’s episode of The Perfect Scam involves a particularly brazen kind of in-person scam.  The victim is a single mom whose child suffers from cystic fibrosis.  Also a veteran, she met a man playing golf who said he was organizing fundraisers for Wounded Warriors and for children’s causes. The man ultimately stole $10,000 from this mom and dozens of other people in the Phoenix area before police arrested him– and discovered he had just finished serving a long prison sentence for running a Ponzi scheme. I hope you’ll listen to this story, which also includes some really useful tips on safe charitable giving from Bennett Weiner, who helps run Give.org for the Better Business Bureau.  If podcasts aren’t your thing, a partial transcript is below.

——————–Partial transcript————————

[00:03:35] Lindsay Meisner: Yeah, my friend, actually her dad died and I hadn’t seen her in a couple of years, and me and her went through kind of a lot, I mean, she was like, Linds, I haven’t seen you in a long time, my dad actually just passed away, and you want to go golfing? And I was like, well I’ve got stuff to do but I’ll rearrange some things and let’s go, let’s go do it. So we met for lunch and headed out to go golf.

[00:03:58] Bob: Just the two of you.

[00:03:59] Lindsay Meisner: Just the two of us.

[00:04:00] Bob: It’s a big deal to get this much time away, right?

[00:04:02] Lindsay Meisner: Yeah, I never have a free minute with, between my daughter and trying to keep up work and trying to keep up with my parents and keeping everybody going, you know.

[00:04:13] Bob: So Lindsay and her friend get their golf clubs ready, meet at the golf course, start chatting right away, and head out for the first tee when…

[00:04:22] Lindsay Meisner: Well he was sitting waiting like, I mean how you, you check in, and then you go to hole 1. He was sitting there waiting like he was with our group.

[00:04:31] Bob: He is a man who says his name is Robert. He’s a solo player ready to join a group. Now if you’ve never played golf, that’s not so unusual. On busy courses solo golfers or couples will be matched up, often with perfect strangers, to make a foursome which will then play the 18 holes together.

[00:04:52] Lindsay Meisner: And he was like, “Well I’m going to play with you guys.” And we were like, “Well, we’re just going to play.” And he was like, “Well I’ll just, I mean I’ll, I play all the time, I’m, I’m quick,” and I mean me and Kim are both just, we talk to anybody and whatever the case may be, so we’re like, whatever, you can play with us. We’re riding in our cart, we’re hitting from the women’s tees, you’re doing your thing, so, we were like whatever, you can play with us, you know.

[00:05:13] Bob: Not unusual. I, I’ve gone out as a single and you join up with some other group is it’s actually polite to the course, right?

[00:05:19] Lindsay Meisner: Yeah, and I mean golf is just a sport where you feel like, I mean I don’t know, like there’s people that you can kind of trust out there, so I was like, oh he looks like he’s my dad’s age, you know, he has a polo on, he has his, like it’s not like some weirdo that you would have thought, okay, I don’t want him to golf with us, like he looked like a normal, just a nice, older guy.

[00:05:37] Bob: So they all tee off, and for several holes, they barely talk.

[00:06:35] Bob: But by the time they approached the back nine, Robert starts to open up a bit more.

[00:06:41] Bob: Well what did he tell you about himself?

[00:06:43] Lindsay Meisner: He just said that he is partially retired. He played semi-pro baseball and now he just does a bunch of stuff for the Wounded Warriors and fundraising for kids and just focuses on doing that kind of stuff. So obviously it triggered me. I’m like, “Oh, I’m a vet.” And then I’m like, “Oh, I even have a Make-A-Wish kid.” So then, I mean it just opened dialog and it was like he just, I don’t know it was weird, because I, he hit me with the two things that matter most to me, so it’s, it was just, I don’t know. I was like, oh, like who else has the same interest than mine, you know?

[00:07:18] Bob: And then their new golf partner mentions a fundraiser he has coming up soon. A fundraiser for Wounded Warriors.

[00:07:26] Lindsay Meisner: He just started talking. He was like, “Hey, you know what, we’re having a golf tournament, and we have to have one um, female player.” And he’s like, ’cause I was playing pretty good, and he was like, “Do you want to play with us?” So I was like, “I don’t know, let me think about it,” you know, and so then we played 18 holes, so it just like conversation just kept going.

[00:07:43] Bob: And just for people who don’t play golf, how long did it take you to play these 18 holes?

[00:07:48] Lindsay Meisner: 4½ hours, maybe 5.

[00:07:50] Bob: That’s per–, pretty normal, but that’s a lot of time to spend with a stranger, right?

[00:07:53] Lindsay Meisner: Yeah, a lot of time.

[00:07:55] Bob: Okay. So you finish 18 holes, he’s asked you to play with him. He’s a, he’s dropped mention of a, of, of doing some charity work. Did you commit to anything at that point?

[00:08:03] Lindsay Meisner: No, I didn’t. We, me and Kim were going to go into the clubhouse and grab a bite to eat, and he was just walking in there like he was going in there too to have a beer. They all knew his name. All of the bartenders knew his name. Everybody in there knew his name, so I was like, oh, like he must have a membership.

[00:08:18] Bob: Um, does he, does he end up sitting with you while you eat?

[00:08:20] Lindsay Meisner: Yeah, well we sat down and grabbed a beer, and he was like, “Well do you mind if I sit with you guys?” And there’s only like four tables in there, it’s super small in there. So I was like, we didn’t care. We were like, whatever, we’re, we’re finally have a good day. Like we’ve been out, we golfed, like we were happy, we had a couple drinks, and it just was like, it felt like normal.

[00:08:37] Bob: And at that point the discussion moves on from the Wounded Warrior golf tournament to another fundraiser Robert says he’s working on.

[00:08:45] Lindsay Meisner: I said, “Well what do you guys have coming up for, for the kids charity event?” ’cause I told him about my daughter having cystic fibrosis. So I was talking to him about that when we were talking about the children’s charity, and he said, “Well we’re doing coupon books, and I always donate 1500 of every single by zip codes worth of books to a foundation, so I would love to donate it to your daughter’s.” And I was like, “Well that would be awesome.”

[00:09:10] Bob: Plenty of schools and youth groups raise money through coupon books. Community businesses donate discount coupons. A printer assembles the coupons into a book, families pay $25 or so so they can buy a book with these coupons, and then the charity and the printer split the money at the end. Robert asks Lindsay to front the cost of printing the books but tells her she’ll get that money back when the books are sold.

[00:09:36] Bob: And, and how much did the coupon book cost?

[00:09:37] Lindsay Meisner: $5000 to print.

[00:09:39] Bob: So a $5000 cost upfront, but after all is said and done, Robert says she’ll get that money back and there will be $1500 in profit leftover which can be donated. It feels like a great idea for Lindsay at the moment because while she does have a few thousand dollars saved up, she can’t really afford to spend it or donate it, but she can afford to lend it to the cause.

[00:10:04] Lindsay Meisner: I just bought a place for my mom, a trailer up the road so that she can come down here from South Dakota, because it clearly, I mean my daughter’s sick and I want here to be able to spend time with her.

[00:10:14] Bob: Sure, sure.

[00:10:14] Lindsay Meisner: And so I was like, well if I can do that versus donating on my own or raising it, I mean it was just going to save time and it was all still going to go to the same spot.

[00:10:25] Bob: Sounds like a perfect proposition.

[00:10:27] Bob: Lindsay is so excited at the chance to make a difference that she doesn’t stop at one coupon book.

[00:10:35] Lindsay Meisner: I was like, well maybe I’ll do one more zip code, ’cause then I could, I could qualify for a table at one of the events, like we can use it and then can take like 8 people from the people that we do the charity golf tournament with, with the veteran one. Then we can all go to the CF event and get a table. I was like, well that’ll make sense because then everybody can go and it’ll be fun for everybody and the vets, you know, like I was like, “We can turn this into just a bunch of good stuff.

[00:10:59] Bob: Yeah, sure.

[00:11:00] Bob: So they leave the golf course and Lindsay is excited about the chance to do good on multiple fronts.

[00:11:07] Lindsay Meisner: And I said, “Well just call me sometime this week and I’ll be around and then I can meet you and, and give you the money.” And so he’s like, “All right.” So then the next day, um he text me and he said, “Hey, um, you know, do you want to meet me at Starbucks on Tatum and whatever? I’m, I’m going to be done golfing.” And I said, “Yeah, I’ve got to pick up my daughter from school and then I can, I’ll drop her off at home and I can meet you over there.” And I said, “What’s the guy’s name that prints the books?” And he gave me this other, the guy that’s supposed to print the books number. And so I text him and he said, saying, “Oh it’ll take about three weeks, you know, to a month.” And so I’m like, “Okay.”

[00:11:45] Bob: When Robert meets with Lindsay, he says he wants to get started right away. So he asks for the money in cash.

[00:11:54] Lindsay Meisner: And I had cash because I had the money, well the place that I bought my mom was like old and rundown. So I just, like I had bartend 10 years ago for a while, so I just always saved that cash. So I was like, well what, I mean I might as well use it. I’m not going to go pull it out of the bank when it, I had that cash sitting there, which was supposed to be to buy my mom’s deck and help redo her place, but I was like, I’ll just get it back and then I’ll do that.

[00:12:17] Bob: You got two of these $5000 books, right?

[00:12:19] Lindsay Meisner: Yeah.

[00:12:19] Bob: So you gave him $10,000.

[00:12:21] Lindsay Meisner: Yep.

[00:12:22] Bob: Man, how, how did you feel when you handed over the, the cash and walked away that day?

[00:12:26] Lindsay Meisner: Ah, I don’t know. I felt okay, like I just felt like I was doing good.

[00:12:34] Bob: But not too long after this meeting at the coffee shop, Lindsay calls Robert to see how things are going and something seems wrong.

[00:12:44] Bob: So you’re going on with your, your very busy life.

[00:12:46] Lindsay Meisner: Yep.

[00:12:46] Bob: You’re thinking it’s going to be; it’s going to take a month so you’re not really even thinking about it, and then what happens?

[00:12:51] Lindsay Meisner: Um, I call and his phone’s shut off. And my stomach sank. And so I called the printer’s number, stomach sank, no answer. No…

[00:13:02] Bob: Oh no.

[00:13:03] Lindsay Meisner: It’s all turned off.

[00:13:04] Bob: It’s all turned off? What happened to the printer? What happened to Robert? Lindsay has a bad feeling about it all, so she gets in her car and heads back to the golf course to see if any of Robert’s friends there have any idea what’s going on. What Lindsay doesn’t know as she drives to the course is that Robert is really Robert Alexander, and Sergeant Joe Lewis of the Scottsdale Police Department’s Financial Crimes Unit has had Robert Alexander under surveillance for several days.

{episode continues with Bennett Weiner’s advice}

[00:35:43] Bob: As for deciding whether one charity or another is going to do good with your donation, Give.org has an extensive list of safe giving tips on its website. Bennett summarizes them for you here.

[00:35:56] Bennett Weiner: Yeah, sure. I, I would say the first thing that comes to mind is watch out for cases of mistaken identity where a charity name that you may hear may sound like an organization you know, but in reality, it, it isn’t. And uh you need to look at the name carefully, you know just because an organization has cancer in its name doesn’t mean that they’re all associated with one another, for example. So uh if you’re not sure about who you’re dealing with, again, do a little work to verify that the organization is the one that you have in mind. The other thing is, and this is really important, not to uh give it… succumb to pressure, to make an on-the-spot gift, whether someone’s coming to your door or a telemarketer or you, you have some other personal approach that’s being used, you don’t have to give immediately. You know you take your time to find out more about the group so you can give with confidence. And uh, the other thing I’d say is to look at the appeal that you get and you know watch out for situations that in the appeal that bring tears to your eyes but don’t really tell you what the organization is doing to address the problem. You shouldn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out what the organization’s activities are. The appeal itself should be clear about what they do. And uh, check the organization’s website for information about uh their achievements, their activities, so you can get a better handle on, on what they’re all about, of course. In terms of checking with outside parties, go to a charity monitoring organization, uh such as our organization at Give.org, to see if they meet our standards. Another possibility is check with state charity officials. Uh, there are about 40 of the 50 states that have specific regulations uh that require charities to register with those offices in order to solicit in those states. It doesn’t mean that the states approve or are recommending that charity, but they have to go through that process in order to solicit. And you know, a lot of people out there that are requesting money for tax-exempt organizations, but not all soliciting entities are necessarily charities. It’s okay to support those other groups if you want to, but you want to verify that the organization you’re contributing to is indeed a charity that is tax-exempt under what is known as Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code which is the section of the code that defines charities. If you want to get a deduction for the organization you have to give a contribution to an organization that has that exempt status.

[00:38:21] Bob: It’s always good to get you know a, a second opinion if you will on the charity you’re going to give to. Uh, I’m at Give.org right now. It’s a very simple and straightforward website. “Find charities you can trust. Enter a charity name.” You just type in a charity and when I hit the search button here, what am I going to see?

[00:38:36] Bennett Weiner: Well, you’re going to see uh organizations that have that particular name or, you know, a portion of that name in the title and you click on that and then you will get to the report on the organization that we have. And the report typically summarizes our evaluation in terms of indicating whether the charity meets all of the 20 standards that we have, and if not, which specific standards are not met. And then you can find out what the reasons that they are noncompliance with that standard and then make your own decision based on that assessment.

[00:39:06] Bob: Okay, so the website works great. I typed in Wounded Warrior and interestingly enough, I got six results. The top one has a logo next to it that says “BBB-accredited charity,” so that makes me feel good, but they, the other ones seem to be sort of a, I think they’re all legitimate, they just are smaller related organizations.

[00:39:23] Bennett Weiner: Well there are other organizations that may use part of the name as part of their name, and um, again, that doesn’t necessarily mean that something inappropriate is happening, but you’re going to find that with popular causes that there are sometimes some name similarity, and that’s why you have to look carefully.

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About Bob Sullivan 1662 Articles
BOB SULLIVAN is a veteran journalist and the author of four books, including the 2008 New York Times Best-Seller, Gotcha Capitalism, and the 2010 New York Times Best Seller, Stop Getting Ripped Off! His latest, The Plateau Effect, was published in 2013, and as a paperback, called Getting Unstuck in 2014. He has won the Society of Professional Journalists prestigious Public Service award, a Peabody award, and The Consumer Federation of America Betty Furness award, and been given Consumer Action’s Consumer Excellence Award.

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