If you bought tickets to a pop-up taco museum restaurant in San Antonio, you got scammed. If someone wants to hook you up with a priest who does exorcisms, beware. But we begin with the story of a brand new scam called call merging. It involves merging your phone call with a scammer and a bank’s two-factor authentication system, stealing your secret code.
[00:00:04] This is Scams and Cons News with Jim Grinstead. If you bought tickets to a pop-up taco museum restaurant in San Antonio, you got scammed. If someone wants to hook you up with a priest who does exorcisms, beware. But we begin with the story of a brand new scam called merging.
[00:00:27] It involves merging your phone call with a scammer, and the bank's two-factor authentication system, sometimes called an OTP call. Scammers call victims claiming a friend shared their number and persuade them to merge an incoming call. The second call is actually a bank's automated OTP verification. By merging, victims unknowingly reveal their OTPs, enabling scammers to complete unauthorized financial transactions.
[00:00:55] The scammer will call you, and they will tell you to merge the call into a conference, right? The victim will get a call from a scammer, and another call will also come, right? And then the victim will be told by the scammer that, yeah, please accept this call and take it in conference, right? It is your friend's call, right? So, when victim will merge this call, it will be the call from bank, right?
[00:01:24] So, bank will be sharing with the OTP, right? So, attacker will, or scammer will listen to this OTP, and then they will be able to do financial transactions on behalf of it. So, this is call marching scam. Experts advise declining calls from unknown numbers and verifying identities before sharing any information to stay protected from such scams.
[00:01:47] Job seekers in Las Vegas were scammed out of hundreds of dollars in application fees in hopes of getting a delivery job with Amazon. But police say that promise of a job turned out to be false. Victims at the scene showed me paperwork detailing the $200 they paid and the drug tests they were allegedly scheduled to take on Friday.
[00:02:08] They believed that they were victims of a scam and spread the information about the scam through social media, which caused a large number of other victims to arrive at the business. Most of the victims spoke Spanish and were Cuban. They told me they're concerned not only about their money, but also their social security numbers and banking information they had to give as part of the application.
[00:02:33] He tells me, 1,800 people, all of them Cuban, were all looking for work. The $200 they asked for for a drug test, now we'll see what happened with those social security numbers. We're here legally in this country. A woman said she handed over her money because she was told her phone may have been cloned. It was those words that got her to drop her defenses and give up all the information the scammers needed to clean out her account.
[00:03:01] Lin Jingping, a 31-year-old designer from Seven Sisters, North London, was the victim of an elaborate scam after receiving a phone call from someone pretending to be from Monzo Bank's fraud and security team. The caller warned her about unauthorized payments on her account, something Lin Jing confirmed herself, which gained her trust.
[00:03:23] The scammer then claimed her phone had been compromised by hackers who could access her personal information, including photos and social media accounts. Following the scammer's instructions, Lin Jingping was manipulated into handing over her bank cards to a courier who arrived at her workplace, under the pretense that the cards were needed as evidence to arrest the hackers.
[00:03:48] She was also tricked into answering numerous security questions, taking out an overdraft, and revealing her PIN. After the scammer hung up, they emptied her account, stealing about $8,000. The scammer urged her to change all her passwords immediately, warning that her phone had likely been cloned. Lin Jingping, terrified and believing she was receiving genuine help, complied with the demands.
[00:04:15] San Antonians, hoping to celebrate their love of tacos, were left disappointed after a so-called taco museum event turned out to be nothing more than an elaborate scam. Dozens of people who paid $50 for VIP tickets showed up at a location near the San Antonio Museum of Art, only to discover the venue had no knowledge of any taco event. The address for the taco museum actually belongs to North River Ice House,
[00:04:43] which was already hosting its own event that day, a fitness pop-up called Booty, Brunch & Bubbly. The owners say they first noticed their address was being used without permission back in January and tried repeatedly to contact the taco museum organizers, but reached what they called was dead end after dead end. According to one of the owners, theirs appears to be part of a nationwide scam. When they researched another supposed taco museum event in Austin,
[00:05:12] the address turned out to be nothing more than a shipping container yard. Ticket holders reportedly received notifications that the event was postponed, but no information about refunds. The taco museum organizers did not respond to requests for comment. A Bend, Oregon bank saved a customer from a scammer, but the scammer fought back with a bomb scare. KTVZ explains. A local bank is on high alert after a bomb threat was reported.
[00:05:42] This happened at the first interstate bank. A customer came in to ask to withdraw funds. When staff determined they were likely being scammed, they declined to process the transaction. That's when they got a call from the potential scammer saying there was a bomb in the parking lot. Bend police rushed to the scene, deployed a drone, and determined there was no threat. This is Scams and Cons News. Undercover officers in Columbia, Illinois,
[00:06:10] recently arrested a man accused of running a six-figure extortion scam, one that demanded payment in gold. The suspect is 26-year-old Raj Patel of Knoxville, Tennessee. Columbia police say he was taken into custody after a sting operation. Here's what investigators say happened. Patel allegedly gained remote access to a woman's computer and then claimed he had compromising information about her. He told her she didn't pay up, in gold.
[00:06:40] He'd make that information public. Fearing the fallout, the woman complied. She withdrew large sums of gold and handed them over to a neutral location, hoping to make the problem disappear. But the threats didn't stop. After a second gold handoff, the victim became suspicious, especially after Patel allegedly promised she'd receive other funds in return, which never materialized. That's when she turned to police.
[00:07:09] Officers confirmed she was being scammed and set up an undercover operation. When Patel showed up for yet another gold exchange, officers arrested him on the spot. The Monroe County State's attorneys charged him with felony theft and attempted theft, both in the $100,000 to $500,000 range. Who among us hasn't felt possessed from time to time and felt the need to go online and find a priest who will perform an exorcism?
[00:07:37] Well, a Brookville, Indiana priest says someone has been advertising his services, and it's a scam. Father Vincent Lampert performed exorcisms for almost 20 years. Now he says someone has been pretending to be him, offering the service as well as rosaries and holy water for money. But the priest tells us he's not even on social media. And unfortunately, a lot of people that believe they're dealing with the demonic are very vulnerable. Father Vincent Lampert of St. Michael Catholic Church in Brookville
[00:08:05] tells us someone has been pretending to be him for more than a year. They took a recent interview that I did and dubbed over my voice with AI, so they were able to add their own words with my actual image. The priest has been in the public eye because of his decades of experience as an exorcist. He tells us his secretary found a Facebook page of someone pretending to be him offering exorcisms and holy items for hundreds of dollars.
[00:08:31] I had a gentleman in Germany who told me that the person got him to pay $2,000 thinking I was flying to Germany to do an exorcism for him. I've had people show up here for appointments, people I did not know, but this person actually got people to give him up to $300 to make an appointment, and then he would send them here to my parish. Father Vincent says he doesn't even have social media and uses email to communicate with parishioners.
[00:09:01] He says the account blocked his secretary and posted about fake conferences to get money from people. Does the Catholic Church charge for an exorcism? Absolutely not. It's considered to be a ministry of charity, so the church would help anyone. One has to wonder why so many people in Indiana feel the need for an exorcism. This is Scams and Cons News.