You can get scammed, and that’s a good thing
What do you do when you’ve been a business writer for the New York Times and are now the personal-finance columnist for New York magazine — an expert — and have given a stranger in a limousine $50,000 in cash, all your savings, and only later realized you’d been conned?
It must be hugely embarrassing to have been such a fool.
They know us too well
I admire Cynthia Cowles for admitting it, writing in The Cut, because by telling her story she will be saving some people from doing the same thing. Maybe you, and (I hate to say this) me.
These people have studied their marks, know the ways they can they trick people like us into doing what we’d never do, have refined their con through lots of practice, and perform their parts at an Academy Award level. They used, she found out later, the techniques of coercive interrogation, which few people can survive.
We are just people doing what we do, trusting the world to be what it looks like. We tend to believe people, because that’s make the world better even if it makes it more dangerous. We’re as vulnerable as a rabbit in an open field, or a vacationing outlander at a threecard monte table in Central Park.
Cowles tells of falling for a scam designed to draw her in little by little — it started innocently enough — so that every step down made sense until she was too far down to turn around and walk away. It’s a story well worth reading.
The scam was smartly designed to answer any question she would ask, usually before she asked it, and to make every claim plausible; to use inside data to trick her into thinking the scammers were legit; to isolate her from the people who’d tell her she was being conned; to make her fear for her family’s life, making her too scared to say no until it was too late.
And all the time convincing her the matter’s so urgent and the danger so great she couldn’t stop to think about what she was doing.
Clever scammers
Here’s the way they stopped her from telling her husband, a minor but crucial part of the scam. This is not the most sophisticated part.
The second person she talked to, supposedly from the Federal Trade Commission, told her that criminals had used her stolen identity and that she was wanted in Maryland and Texas for cybercrimes, money laundering, and drug trafficking. The real criminals were watching her and meant her harm.
Then he headed off the main danger to the scam. “The first thing you must do is not tell anyone what is going on,” he told her. “Everyone around you is a suspect.”
She responded that her husband was definitely not a drug dealer. He said he believed her, but that the criminals had hacked her computer and phone. “These are sophisticated criminals with a lot of money at stake,” he said. “You should assume you are in danger and being watched. You cannot take any chances.”
She was then transferred to a man supposedly from the CIA — transferring her from person to increasingly worrying person was part of the trick — who made the same demand and added a new reason.
“In many cases like this, we have to investigate the spouse as well, and the less he knows, the less he is implicated,” he said, telling her to lie to him, which she didn’t want to do. “You are being investigated for major federal crimes,” he told her, firmly, switching quickly from good cop to bad cop. “By keeping your husband out of this, you are protecting him.”
As I said, I admire Cowles for telling the story, putting up a permanent monument to her stupidity. But was she stupid? And if she was, was she any stupider than most of us would be?
I don’t think so. She made one basic mistake, in not telling her husband. Once she made that mistake, the rest followed. As a rule, if someone tells you that you can’t tell anyone, you must tell someone.
A natural mistake
Any of us might make that mistake, if our judgment had been compromised in the way the scam is designed to do. We’d fear the possibly getting someone we love killed. Would you risk your husband or wife or child or friend even if the odds are two to one the thing’s a fraud?
Even if the odds are one in three or one in five or one in ten? If you take the bet it’s a fraud at ten to one odds, and it’s real, you’ll have killed someone you loved, and in the case of her husband someone her little boy loved, and needed. You’ll hate yourself for the rest of your life, because you’d put a price on your loved one’s head.
Cynthia Cowles wasn’t stupid, but properly human. You can reliably protect yourself from scams only by hardening yourself against the world, but that’s no way to live. You’ll be safe, but you’ll never enjoy the field.