[00:00:00] I'm headed off on Summer Hiatus and to produce episodes you'll hear in Season 5, which begins in September. Before I go, I want to give you a preview of additional content I'll be adding this fall.
[00:00:13] It's entitled Scams & Cons News, and it features stories about scams happening in the world right now. If you've been a regular listener, you'll recognize all the scams you've learned about in our previous episodes and how they're being used today.
[00:00:28] Of course I'll continue to produce regular episodes, this is just something extra. And I'd love to hear your feedback, so if you have something to say, drop an email to news at scamsandcons.com. This is Scams & Cons News with Jim Grinstead. This is the news for June 1st, 2023.
[00:00:56] Topping today's news, a scammer conned families into sending the ashes of dead relatives to an artist who would incorporate them into custom paintings. The artist then charged them thousands to have the paintings shipped to them.
[00:01:10] A Florida school principal sent $100,000 in public money to a man he believed was Elon Musk and doctors in Houston are being scammed into paying $5,000 fines for failing to show up for jury duty or lose their medical licenses. These and other stories are up next.
[00:01:31] We begin in New York, where the New York Times says scammers are taking advantage of natural disasters to steal money. Earlier this year, a gunman at Michigan State University killed three students and injured five more. Immediately campaigns began to raise money for the families of the victims.
[00:01:49] Many of those campaigns were set up by scammers, hoping to skim off a share of the money intended for victims' families. Some of those campaigns are attached to the website GoFundMe. The company has a team that goes to work after such tragedies to weed out identifiable false accounts.
[00:02:05] When those fake accounts are identified, they're frozen. The company says fewer than one out of every 1,000 GoFundMe appeals are fake and about one-quarter of its 350-plus employees worldwide work on its trust and safety team.
[00:02:20] In Chicago, scammers discovered that a little glue and a tap of your ATM card gives them a window into clearing out your bank account. And they don't even need your PIN number. ABC7 in Chicago outlines it. I went out to go use the machine on the right.
[00:02:36] I inserted my card. It didn't work. Then a man in line offered advice. The fellow that was in the sidewalk came up and said, oh, if you have the chip in your card, you can tap it. So Pamela tapped her card. This time it worked.
[00:02:54] She got her cash. Thank the man and walkoff. The next morning I looked at my bank account. To her shock, Pamela saw three more withdrawals from her account. $940 was gone. I said that guy scammed me last night at the ATM machine. It starts with glue.
[00:03:14] They put glue in the card reader of the ATM machines so you can't use your cards. So customers tap their card instead. And here's the trick. When you tap, the account remains open for more transactions unless the customer proactively logs out.
[00:03:34] Some customers don't know this, but scammers do. They wait for the victim to leave then walk up and continue making withdrawals on their account. All three victims filed a fraud claim with Chase Bank. All three were denied. The bank said the customers authorized those withdrawals.
[00:03:51] Victims said Chase would not review surveillance video because the amounts were below $5,000. In the end, it took a call from the TV station to get the bank to refund the money to the victims featured in the news report.
[00:04:04] But the bank says it won't release surveillance video because the amounts were less than $5,000. In Juneau, Alaska, scammers got away with more than $269,000 from the city of Juneau using social engineering techniques. The scammers created a spoofed email address that looked like a legitimate
[00:04:23] vendor, then tricked the city employee into updating the routing and account numbers for the vendors bank account. The new account of course belonged to a scammer who received the payments due to the innocent vendor. The city should have known better. A similar scheme in 2019 cost them more than $329,000.
[00:04:43] A charter school principal in Volusia County, Florida has resigned after sending $100,000 to an internet scammer who claimed to be Elon Musk. WESH elaborates. Burn science and technology here is a-rated with just under 1,000 students at a huge waiting list and the principal who's guided it all these years,
[00:05:04] Dr. Jan McGee, a superstar in many circles. But a lapse in judgment has cost her her job. I am a very smart lady, well educated. I fell for a scam. Dr. Jan McGee told a packed audience she was taken in by a fake Elon Musk,
[00:05:27] someone posing online as the space pioneer, someone she'd been talking with for at least four months, despite being warned by staff the person was a fraud. She claims he groomed her. Rooney means when you talk to somebody and you believe in them
[00:05:42] and they get you to trust them that this is really real. And so I fell for it. For years, Principal McGee had talked to anyone who would listen about getting Musk and his money involved in the STEM school, a stone's throw from the space coast
[00:05:58] and apparently thought she'd finally gotten his ear. Somehow she believed it. I mean, he must have been really convincing. So much so, says Burns, school board chairman Albert Almatato. McGee wrote this $100,000 check out of the school's account. She reportedly believed the person she made the check out
[00:06:16] to was Elon Musk's right hand man. Matching funds with this guy and he was supposed to give like $6 million to the school. The principal had authorization to write a check up to 50,000 out of the account. But no more without board approval, which she did not get.
[00:06:34] Fortunately, the school's business manager Brent Appy got wind and stopped the check before it cleared. I put myself into this position and into this mess and I made a bad decision. This is Scams and Cons News. Woodstock, Georgia was the scene
[00:06:53] of one of the most bizarre scams we've seen. USA Today reported that a Georgia artist offered to incorporate the ashes of a Tennessee woman into a painting at no charge. The dead woman's daughter communicated with the scammer via TikTok and the scammer asked for details about the mother
[00:07:09] and what an appropriate painting might look like. The daughter sent the ashes to a Georgia address and a few days later, the artist notified her that he had a big job in Cambodia. He promised to complete the painting there and ship it to her.
[00:07:23] In short order, the daughter got an email supposedly from Cambodia customs officials saying she owed $3,576 for the package to be cleared and shipped to her home. The money was to be transferred via a cash app to an address in, wait for it, Nigeria.
[00:07:42] There were reportedly other victims including the Georgia man who did not understand why boxes of ashes kept showing up at his front door. He'd thrown one box of ashes away but Woodstock police alerted the man before other remains were lost. Another victim was the real artist whose name
[00:07:58] and website were used to establish credibility. His sales plummeted after stories about the scams found their way onto the internet. In Honolulu, stickers have been showing up on about 1,700 parking meters telling those who have been issued parking tickets to send their fines to a website.
[00:08:16] The stickers included the names of real city officials. The phone number and address listed on the sticker belonged to local residents who had no idea their identities were being used. The website was a fake and the scammers collected some funds but there's no estimate
[00:08:30] of how much money they got away with. In Houston, some 60 doctors and medical workers were scammed by phone callers saying they'd missed jury duty. The caller said they owe a $5,000 fine and if they didn't pay, their medical licenses would be revoked. What should have tipped the victims off
[00:08:49] was that the scammer wanted to be paid with a gift card. I'm Jim Grinstead and this is Scams and Cons News. Did you guys hear about that couple that went on vacation and one spouse murdered the other? In fact, the entire vacation was planned
[00:09:12] just so that they could make the murder look like an accident. Ah, so like a slaycation. Oh boy, sounds like a fun new true crime podcast to me. On every episode of Slaycation, we'll examine true cases of people who were killed while on vacation. Was it murder?
[00:09:33] Or just a horrible accident? That's up to you and the law to decide. But either way, if you leave for your vacation in the plane and come home under the plane, you've definitely gone on a slaycation. Join us every week for a fascinating new episode. 911, what's your emergency?
[00:09:53] But make sure to pack your body bags because getting away can be murder. This is Slaycation.