Widow drained of $39K in gift card scam (and she isn’t alone) | News
Kate Kleinert never imagined she would ever rush to a store to buy gift cards to fix somebody else’s string of problems.
First, there was the young teen who lost her mother a few years ago, found herself in a boarding school in London and needed motherly assistance — and a $100 gift card — as she developed into a woman.
Then, the teen’s father Tony needed to hire a lawyer — and get ahold of several thousand dollars — to get out of a work contract overseas so that he could return to the United States to be with Kate.
Kleinert is a kind, compassionate woman, and generally skeptical. She never imagined she’d feel an emotional spark like she did last summer when Tony sent her a friend request on Facebook during the pandemic.
“Normally, I don’t reply to those but there was something about him that spoke to me,” said Kleinert, 68, a retired executive secretary whose husband died in 2009 at their home in Glenolden, Pa., outside Philadelphia.
Tony always seemed to know how to say the right things.
He gave her access to see his Bank of America online account, for example, to prove that he could be trusted and he’d pay her back soon. She saw that he had more than $2 million sitting there in the bank. He just needed her to help him deal with a payment while he was overseas.
She thought she was managing OK after being a widow for 11 years. She had been married a long time, though, and missed her husband. Tony seemed like the real deal.
Her husband Bernard was a Teamsters Local 500 shop steward, according to his obituary online, worked as a tractor trailer driver and also drove a school bus where he knew the names and stories of each child on his bus.
The couple enjoyed fostering rescue collies. They had been married 26 years. They never had children.
She soon thought that the man who called himself “Tony Richard” — pronounced as ri-Shard — was a second chance for happiness. He was in Iraq, working for the United Nations as a surgeon. They soon began talking on the Hangouts App.
Tony was handsome, spoke with a French accent, often was able to talk with her four or five times a day, and told her loving things, like: “I woke up this morning and I missed you.”
All the time, of course, there was another reason to send a gift card.
Scammers want your money on a gift card
Federal Trade Commission data indicates that consumers have reported spending nearly $245 million on gift cards that they used as payment to scammers from January 2018 through September 2020.
It happens for many reasons: IRS and Social Security impersonation scams. Scams where someone pretends to be a grandchild or other family member or friend in need. Tech support scams. Romance scams. An email from someone pretending to be your boss or minister who needs you to buy gift cards.
Individuals can lose several hundred — or even several thousand — dollars. The median loss by individuals was $820 from January 2018 through September 2020, according to an FTC analysis.
Kathy Stokes, AARP’s director of fraud prevention programs, said the scammers have a winning formula for getting someone into a heightened emotional state. Professional con artists often refer to getting the victim under the ether.
When you’re in this fog, you might not question why a Best Buy gift card can be used to pay a tax obligation to keep you out of jail or help you land a loan to cover bills.
“Once they have somebody under the ether, they can pretty much convince them of anything,” Stokes said.
“These are sophisticated criminal enterprises. It’s not one against one. It’s one against thousands.”
The crooks learn a bit about you in advance, often doing some research online, seem legitimate and can be extremely persuasive.
After all the scam warnings, one might be amazed that anyone would go out and put hundreds or thousands of dollars on…
Read More: Widow drained of $39K in gift card scam (and she isn’t alone) | News