Michelle Singletary
speaker
62 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Apr 2025
Michelle Singletary’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
But in the end, it's her money and they gave it over to her because it's her money. Then the scammer manipulated and tricked her into taking the money and divided it into four banks in Maryland because they know the system, right? If you pull almost $600,000 out, And then you put it into an account and then try to take it all at once. That's going to send like all kinds of bills.
And so pulling out $10,000 to $20,000 at a time from those different banks, the scammer was hoping that nobody would notice that they wouldn't say something. And in one of the parts, I talked to a scam victim and a bank manager actually saved her from having more money stolen because he suspected something.
But instead of saying, ma'am, I think this is a scam, he said, hey, why don't you come into my office? Let's talk about what's going on. Where's the money being sent again? Let me just make sure it's going to be sent to the right address. Then he pulled it up on his computer and showed her that it was an abandoned house. So see how he did that differently?
He didn't go, nobody would ask you for that. He said, hey, let's see where the address, let's just double check where the money's being sent. That's a different way. And when he did that and he showed her on the computer, that's when she came out of the ether. And they called the police and they came to the bank branch.
That's exactly right. You have to lead them. You have to be gentle. You can't be judgmental because they are in this ether and you have to slowly pull them out. Because remember, the scammer has been talking to them every day, week in, week out. You think you're talking to a police, a real agent of the FBI.
And the agent is saying the whole time, listen, don't tell anybody because this could jeopardize the case. So there was enough nuggets of truth to make it believable.
Unfortunately, her money's gone. The FBI did get the case. And in fact, she was one of 13 victims with the same scammer using the same agent's information. The amount of money stolen from them was almost $3 million. And they tracked it to a syndicate in India. And that's where it is now. There are investigators in India trying to track it down. But in all likelihood, the money is all gone.
She was able to get back about $50,000 through the quick thinking of a local investigator. Some of the money was sent in cashier checks. So they were able to track it to California, to a woman who was supposed to pick it up, who herself was a scam victim. And she suspected something and didn't pick up the checks. And they were able to have that money sent back to Judah.
She's also facing a huge tax bill. Because this was tax-advantaged retirement money, the government, she took a withdrawal. She's getting taxed on it because they just see it as withdrawal. There was a law change, you know, the 2017 tax law change took out the deduction for theft. So many scam victims are facing huge tax bills for retirement money that they no longer have.
That's correct. Lots of times the money's in cash or gold or things that are not traceable. Oddly enough, they are in some cases able to track it if cryptocurrency was used. But if it's cash or gold bars, the money's gone. And in her case... It's very unlikely. The case is still pending.
Sometimes if they are able to catch the syndicate and freeze bank accounts and identify victims, some money can be returned, but often not. They never see this money again.
It irritates me so because they make it sound like these feeble old people sitting by their phone answering calls for scammers. That's just not how it happens at all. Young adults, I think, is twice as likely to fall for or be victimized in a scam because they're online more, they're searching for jobs, the avenues where the scammers are, young adults are, right?
The reason why we see more stories about the elderly population is because they've got the money. They've got big retirement accounts and the scammers know that. So they are targeting them, particularly not because of their age, but because they've got the money. They spent life careers saving up.
And so the score, if you will, is larger with them than with a young adult who may only have, you know, a couple thousand dollars. And that's why we see the large dollar amounts in the elderly community. So we have to change our language of that. It's not because they're old. It's because they got the money that they are targeting.
It's going to take efforts from everybody, the police, the technology companies. There's got to be more effort to prevent spoofing of calls so people can't change ID numbers and show that they're from the Rockville Police Department when it really is a call center in India.
The police need more resources to be able to go out to the communities for fraud prevention, but also put people on these cases because we tell people to file a police report. But that doesn't necessarily mean somebody is going to be assigned to look into that. It just helps the data collection more than anything. And I think in terms of prevention, we have to be as persistent as the scammers.
For example, in my family group, I regularly send text messages or emails like, hey, this new scam is out, or hey, I got this. Don't click on anything in this because I got something similar to that. So we have to have conversations. We have friend groups or you're meeting for the holidays now. Make this part of the family dinner.
I know it doesn't sound so festive, but just say, hey, did you read that seven-part series in the Washington Post? Let's talk about that. How would you respond? What can we do to protect each other? I was on another program and one of the hosts said that her and her husband have a code word so that if someone calls pretending to be one of them, they have to tell them the code word. I love that.
I'm going to actually institute that with my own husband because I tell people the other thing is don't trust anything, no text. email, nothing, just blanket, nobody. I don't believe anybody. If my husband called me, I don't believe you. If he walked in my door right now and said something, I said, baby, I'm going to check that.
And it's sad that we have to do that, but you have to just say, I don't believe anything. I got a text message from my bank that said my credit card had been compromised. And the text came in under other texts, legitimate texts from my bank. So previous texts, absolutely legitimate. But I said, you know what? I don't know. They might have figured out a way to tap into this. So I called them.
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