Stoneham Police: Watch Out For These Scam Artists!

From the Stoneham Police Department:

STONEHAM, MA - From Stoneham Police Department Office Manager Erin Sinclair:

I get a call about once a week to see if a particular email or phone call is legitimate. I would say probably 9 times out of 10 they are phony and a huge waste of time. These people usually sit around a computer for many hours a day looking to exploit vulnerable people. With this in mind, I have decided to research the most common scams around today.

Phishing scams are probably one of the most common via the internet today. These scams generally are successful when you give them your personal information. A lot of times you won’t even recognize a real email from the fake, but basically you are sent an email from your utility company, or your mortgage company or even insurance company looking for you to fill out a personal information form for more information regarding your current account. Hopefully, your security software in your computer will send these emails to your spam folder, but if they don’t, criminals will send these emails with a link for you to enter your personal information, or provide you with a phone number to call to extract your personal information. These fake emails are usually difficult to detect from the real companies emails but more times than not they contain many spelling and grammatical errors. I would suggest that you never type your personal information via the internet and be wary if you are redirected from the original website when asked personal information. I would recommend always calling from a phone, but I do want to warn you that sometimes calling is not full-proof.

Another classic scam is the Nigerian scheme! We have probably all seen or heard of this scam. Basically there are usually people sitting in a room in another country spending all day sending these emails out to people. The scammer usually claims to be a Prince who is reaching out to you personally after a death of a family member, with some crazy story that the family member who passed was extremely rich and that the money is stuck in an account and the only way to free the money would be to wire a certain amount back to them so they can pay the taxes to free the money. Sometimes the Prince wishes to relocate his money out of the country and asks you to provide your banking information so he can transfer the money to your personal account and he will pay a fee for this. Sorry, but there is no Prince! This type of scam according to CNBC rakes in around $13 billion a year.

One scam that I have been personally involved with dozens of times is via Craigslist.com. These people will look through Craigslist and answer an ad you have for rental property or even a car for sale. They basically will send you a bank check sometimes even a certified check from a known bank for the amount of the item or rental plus a large amount over the asking amount. Then they will call you and when you see the check for the large amount of money they will ask you to send them the difference of the over payment. By the time you cash the check and get a call from the bank realizing that the certified cashier’s check or bank check is false, you have already mailed them a check for the difference and they would have cashed your personal check leaving you out of luck. I have called banks and they advised me that these fake cashier’s checks could take up to 90 days to identify that they are fraudulent. This type of scam is not insured against fraudulent activity so please be careful.

The last one I will leave you with is ever so common is the “You’ve Won Big” scam. These people will either email or call you advising you that you have just one a huge amount of money either through publishers clearing house or another organization you may or may not have been involved with. These people will tell you that you just need to wire the taxes or fees on the money. This does not make any sense. If someone tells you that you need to pay to receive winnings, that should be a red flag. Also anytime that you are asked to wire money that should also be a flag, unless you are wiring the money to a known family member who needs it.

Basically when you wire money to a stranger, they give you their name and when you go to wire the money they give you a code. Once you give the code to the person on the other end they just get a fake identification card with the name and armed with the code they get cash from their end leaving you out of any money you sent with little or no trace of who sent it.

You may not always recognize a scam when it presents itself, but if I can teach you anything to rationalize all these scams it's this: If it’s too good to be true, it’s usually a scam!

Remember Safety First!

Images via the Stoneham Police Department.