[00:00:00] In Hamburg gibt es ein Polizeirevier, in dem kann alles geschehen. Von Nächten mit Filmriss auf dem Kiez bis zu privaten Dramen auf der Wache.
[00:00:09] Von ägyptischen Schätzen, die verschwinden, bis zu Kollegen, die immer füreinander da sind. Und von großen Fischen, die ins Netz gehen, bis zu kleinen Haien, die noch eine Chance bekommen.
[00:00:22] Das Großstadtrevier. Mehr als ein Revier. Immer montags um 18.50 Uhr im Ersten.
[00:00:34] This is Scams and Cons News with Jim Grinstead.
[00:00:38] False claims of cancer allowed good-hearted people to donate $100,000 to help a woman.
[00:00:45] And a scammer got scammed, and that's always good news around here.
[00:00:48] But we begin with Austin Thompson's father, Monty.
[00:00:53] He died by suicide after being scammed by a fraudster posing as a representative from Publishers Clearinghouse.
[00:01:00] In July, Monty received a call from the scammer, who promised him a large cash prize and a new truck.
[00:01:07] But it required upfront payments for taxes and fees.
[00:01:11] Over two months, Monty sent the scammer at least $8,000, believing he could help his family with the winnings.
[00:01:18] Austin noted that his father had always been a regular caller, but on that day he did not reach out.
[00:01:24] Shortly after the call, Monty's mother found him deceased at home.
[00:01:28] Austin has since been investigating the situation and discovered the extent of the scam,
[00:01:34] which he believes contributed to his father's mental decline and ultimate decision to take his life.
[00:01:40] KETV tells more.
[00:01:42] What baffles me the most is he didn't call.
[00:01:46] He, I knew how much he loved me.
[00:01:48] I knew how proud he was of me.
[00:01:50] But he always called.
[00:01:53] No matter what.
[00:01:54] But there was a phone call Monty did have.
[00:01:56] This is the phone call that I was talking about.
[00:02:00] On July 24th at 1 28 PM.
[00:02:04] An unknown number.
[00:02:05] It lasted four minutes.
[00:02:07] And my grandma showed up at the house and found him at 2 o'clock.
[00:02:11] 2 PM on July 24th.
[00:02:14] That is the day that my dad hung himself.
[00:02:17] A candle, now a memory of Monty's life.
[00:02:20] Austin Thompson later found out his dad was being scammed.
[00:02:23] And that voice on the phone told Monty he was from the publisher's clearinghouse.
[00:02:27] They had reached out saying that he had won millions of dollars and a new Ford F-150.
[00:02:34] I know exactly what he was thinking.
[00:02:35] I can help my mom.
[00:02:36] I can help my sons.
[00:02:38] He was thinking about everybody else before he was thinking about what he can get.
[00:02:42] But there was a catch.
[00:02:44] He had to pay taxes and fees up front.
[00:02:46] From what I found just in his record, I know it's over $8,000 in two months.
[00:02:51] KETV Investigates took Austin's story to the Iowa Attorney General's office.
[00:02:55] Unfortunately, the publisher's clearinghouse scam is a common one.
[00:03:00] They string the person along for a long time and require a payment before they can get their prize.
[00:03:05] And only when the prize is not delivered and the person is off and out of money does the person find out what the scammer was really doing to them.
[00:03:12] We brought Mr. Thompson's case to you.
[00:03:15] Is there anything that can be done here?
[00:03:17] We are helping them through it and also getting to the bottom of just what happened.
[00:03:22] I'll say at this point, and it is preliminary, we think the scammers were located offshore, perhaps even in Jamaica.
[00:03:30] Brenna Byrd says her office is investigating.
[00:03:32] But if these criminals aren't from the U.S., there's little she can do.
[00:03:36] When we have a scammer who's offshore in Jamaica, we can't get the money back.
[00:03:40] And we also can't bring this person before a court so they can be held accountable for what they did like we could if they were under our jurisdiction.
[00:03:50] So it's very difficult.
[00:03:51] You know, there's a reason they operate offshore like that in the shadows.
[00:03:55] That scammer kept calling.
[00:03:57] This is actually my dad's phone.
[00:03:58] It was Austin who, after his dad died, recorded the conversations.
[00:04:03] They called, uh, fifth over 20 times at least.
[00:04:09] He wants people to know this can happen to anybody.
[00:04:11] People say like, how stupid could you be?
[00:04:13] It's not the fact of being stupid.
[00:04:16] It's a fact of how good these people are.
[00:04:19] They can manipulate.
[00:04:21] And he believes that manipulation led directly to his dad's suicide.
[00:04:26] They took literally everything.
[00:04:27] They took every cent he had.
[00:04:29] They, and then they took his life because of what they did.
[00:04:34] Amanda Riley pleaded guilty in 2021 to wire fraud for faking cancer to solicit it more than $100,000 in donations from hundreds of victims from 2012 to 2019.
[00:04:46] Court records say the former elementary school teacher started a blog called Lymphoma Can Suck It in 2012, chronicling her alleged battle with Hodgkin's lymphoma and using it to solicit donations for her non-existent medical treatments.
[00:05:03] Riley shaved her head, posted photos of herself in hospitals, falsified medical records, and forged doctor's notes.
[00:05:11] She even convinced a megachurch and friends that she was terminally ill.
[00:05:16] Investigative journalist Nancy Moscatello uncovered the scam and passed the case to law enforcement.
[00:05:23] In 2022, Riley was sentenced to 60 months in federal prison and ordered to pay more than $105,000 in restitution.
[00:05:32] Her case made history as the first financial conviction of someone who faked cancer for fundraising purposes.
[00:05:38] Even while serving her sentence at FMC Carswell Federal Prison in Texas, Riley continued to fake illness, being transported to the ER by ambulance more than two dozen times in her first 18 months.
[00:05:53] Prosecutors say medical staff saw Riley manipulate tests to appear ill.
[00:05:58] At least four doctors diagnosed her with facetious disorder, a mental illness involving feigning illness for attention.
[00:06:05] This is Scams and Cons News.
[00:06:09] This complex financing talk is very hard.
[00:06:12] Do I get my depot ever?
[00:06:15] But you already have a depot.
[00:06:17] No.
[00:06:17] Yes, you have the Vodafone Gigadepot.
[00:06:20] That's right.
[00:06:21] And I have myself in the hand how big my depot is.
[00:06:23] Now with the Vodafone Gigadepot and the data volume of the next month.
[00:06:28] Go on in the 5G-Netz of Vodafone.
[00:06:31] Vodafone. Together we can.
[00:06:35] If you had a 10-year-old daughter with brain cancer, it's likely you'd do whatever to improve her life, including getting Taylor Swift tickets.
[00:06:43] You'd be devastated to learn that you paid a lot of money for tickets, but have been scammed.
[00:06:48] Fox 5 in Atlanta explained what happened.
[00:06:51] Program director at iHeart's 105.3, Otis Mayer, sent the story to Swift's record company to make this moment happen.
[00:06:59] It hit me in some special way that I was like, I know I've got to do something.
[00:07:03] For a little girl named Caroline who was here, she's just walking through.
[00:07:06] We want to send you and your mom to go to New Orleans to see Taylor Swift on the heiress tour.
[00:07:13] Tickets, hotel, flights, all paid for.
[00:07:16] This surprise, just what this 10-year-old fighter needs to keep pressing on.
[00:07:21] Not every scam story has a bad ending.
[00:07:25] It shouldn't be surprising that scammers sometimes get scammed themselves.
[00:07:29] It's the world they live in.
[00:07:31] But a Ugandan scammer found himself in a scam he could barely escape.
[00:07:36] Jalil Bouiki, a 32-year-old from Uganda, was lured into a scamming operation in Southeast Asia under the guise of a lucrative job.
[00:07:46] Upon arrival, Bouiki and others were forcibly made to work in a compound, enduring harsh conditions and forced labor under the threat of violence.
[00:07:56] AI voice Daniel reads from the New York Times article.
[00:08:00] Using a script, he was expected to persuade at least two prospects daily to provide their phone numbers
[00:08:06] so they could continue their blossoming romance off the dating app and on WhatsApp or Telegram.
[00:08:14] After the target gave up his direct number, the workers took screenshots of the conversation on the dating app
[00:08:20] and handed him off to a higher-level scammer who would continue the conversation over text.
[00:08:27] Most of us were doing it because we wanted to survive there, Mujeka said.
[00:08:31] We never really wanted to scam anyone.
[00:08:33] I looked at it as if I was in a prison.
[00:08:36] Let me do my time and let me get out of here.
[00:08:40] But he was working 17-hour shifts, seven days a week, with no release date in sight.
[00:08:47] They keep you there for as long as they can, he said, until you are not productive.
[00:08:53] After four months, Mujeka was spent.
[00:08:56] He even started warning victims not to fall for the scams in messages he immediately deleted.
[00:09:03] His managers disciplined him for declining productivity with hundreds of push-ups, extra hours and runs around the parking lot.
[00:09:12] During his fifth month, he said his operation and its workers was sold to an even stricter enterprise.
[00:09:19] The new bosses fined their laborers for everything, including going to the washroom for more than five minutes, Mujeka said.
[00:09:28] A Chinese teenage boy he knew was tortured so badly, he came back to the workroom without fingernails.
[00:09:35] Desperate, Mujeka proposed a deal to his captors.
[00:09:39] Let him go, and he would take a sick Ugandan woman with him, relieving them of that burden.
[00:09:45] A massive digital ad fraud operation, allegedly run by Russian criminals, is raking in an estimated $3-5 million a day, according to a report by the firm White Ops.
[00:09:58] It's being called the largest digital ad fraud scheme ever uncovered.
[00:10:03] The scammers have been manipulating video ad clicks, using fake domains to simulate traffic on major websites like ESPN and Vogue.
[00:10:13] White Ops has dubbed the group AFK-13, and say they meticulously orchestrated their operations.
[00:10:21] The criminals created more than 6,000 fake domains and more than 250,000 phony URLs, tricking advertising algorithms into thinking their fraudulent sites were legitimate.
[00:10:34] These systems, which quickly bid on ad space, were duped into buying fake web traffic generated by a bot farm controlled by AFK-13.
[00:10:44] The bots, more than 570,000 strong, were made to appear like real users, interacting with the ads through clicks and even mimicking behaviors like mouse movements and social media logins.
[00:10:57] In what's being called the meth bot campaign, these bots watched up to 300 million video ads each day, earning an average of $13 per 1,000 views.
[00:11:09] The hackers behind this operation even reverse-engineered ad quality verification systems, making their traffic look legitimate.
[00:11:18] They obtained hundreds of thousands of U.S.-based IP addresses to further disguise her activities.
[00:11:25] White Ops began tracking the operation in 2015, but the fraud didn't really launch until October 2016.
[00:11:32] Though the direct Russian connection remains unclear, White Ops claims to have evidence linking the operation to a single group in Russia.
[00:11:41] The company has been cooperating with federal law enforcement, but recovering lost funds could prove challenging, especially if cooperation from Russian authorities is not forthcoming.
[00:11:52] As experts like Jer Magnuson of SourcePoint Technologies point out, shutting down this fraud will require industry-wide cooperation.
[00:12:01] The scale of the fraud may even be larger than currently reported.
[00:12:05] .