How America Got Scammed

Modern fraudsters are taking advantage of social isolation and insecurities—and Americans of all ages are falling prey.

Latest Mar 19, 2024 0 46 Add to Reading List

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People are more susceptible to scams than they may think—and Americans are losing more money to fraud than ever.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Falling for Fraud

Americans passed a discomfiting benchmark last year: For the first time, they lost a collective $10 billion to fraud, according to data that the Federal Trade Commission released last month. Taking advantage of social isolation and unmet needs, scammers are using ever more sophisticated methods to tailor their grifts and blanket Americans with requests for money, gift cards, cryptocurrency, and personal information.

Scammers often bring up sensitive topics such as romance, immigration, and finances to rile victims into a state of heightened emotion. This simple, devastating approach can make people act less rational than they would otherwise. The schemes can target specific insecurities: For people who are struggling financially, a get-rich-quick proposal might be compelling. For a recent college graduate, the promise of a well-paying job could be impossible to resist. And for a grandparent, a voice on the line saying their grandchild is in danger might trigger an urgent response.

Last month, a New York magazine financial writer published a viral essay about falling for a scam. She picked up a call from someone claiming to be an Amazon customer-service worker, who then connected her to a so-called FTC investigator who knew a troubling amount about her and her family. By the end of the call, she was stuffing $50,000 into a shoebox to hand off to a stranger. Her tale was harrowing and extreme, and it seemed to strike a nerve. In the days that followed, many responses on social media boiled down to: That would never happen to me.

But people are more prone to being conned than they would like to admit. Stacey Wood, a psychology professor at Scripps College who studies scams, told me that although not every consumer is likely to fall for a scam, “it’s difficult to know if you would fall for it until you’re in that same emotional state.” Compliance with scams is much higher, she added, than most people realize. Ninety percent of respondents to a Citi survey were confident that they could spot and evade scams, but more than a quarter also said they had fallen victim to them.

No one type of person gets swindled. But loneliness and social isolation are major risk factors in falling for fraud, Marti DeLiema, an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota’s School of Social Work, told me. “Scammers thrive on secrecy and creating confidential relationships,” she explained. They generally instruct people not to tell anyone else about the conversation. People who are alone in a house, without someone else there to administer a reality check, are vulnerable. Older adults tend to fall into this group, though DeLiema said that they are not necessarily more susceptible across the board, in spite of narratives that position them as typical victims of fraud.

Extremely online young people can be equally, or sometimes even more, vulnerable to scams. Social media is now a central channel for scammers, Wood told me, and AI is making it difficult for even discerning people to identify suspicious requests. Ten percent of people aged 18 to 29 reported being the victim of a financial scam, compared with 9 percent of people 65 and older, according to Gallup polling last year. (Other polls have found similar results.) Data from the FTC showed that, although people in their 60s lost a higher median dollar amount to scams than people in their 20s, young people actually had a higher rate of reports in 2023. Wood said that many young people are more willing than older people to report incidents—even relatively small dollar amounts—which may affect the data.

The $10 billion figure, although massive, is likely an underestimate, Wood noted. Many people, ashamed and afraid of being blamed or mocked, keep scam stories to themselves. Older people in particular may fear appearing less competent. But shaming victims is not all that helpful. What makes a difference, DeLiema said, is educating consumers so that they can cut scammers off before they attack on an emotional level. If someone claims to be calling from the IRS and demands an immediate wire payout, for example, stop things there. (The IRS may phone you for overdue bills, but they will never call looking for a money transfer using a specific payment method.) Don’t wait until they’ve frightened you and pushed you into a state of fear and distress.

Scams run the gamut of human needs and vulnerabilities. You could get swindled in a different way than your grandmother or nephew might, and that’s by design. The result might be a crushing financial loss—but, as Wood told me, the emotional ramifications can be even more devastating.

Related:

Today’s News

The Supreme Court allowed a controversial immigration law to go into effect for now in Texas. The Court’s ruling gives state officials permission to arrest and detain those they suspect of crossing the border illegally.
The former Trump adviser Peter Navarro, who was involved in attempts to subvert the 2020 election, began serving a four-month prison sentence for contempt of Congress.
Jair Bolsonaro, the former Brazilian president, was indicted over allegations of falsifying his COVID-vaccination status, with other future indictments potentially in store.

Dispatches

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Evening Read

an adult's hand holds up a baby's feet, in greyscale — Millennium Images / Gallery Stock

The Mothers Who Aren’t Waiting to Give Their Children Cystic-Fibrosis Drugs

By Sarah Zhang

At six months pregnant, Sonja Lee Finnegan flew from Switzerland to France to buy $20,000 worth of drugs from a person she had never met. The drug she was after, Trikafta, is legal in Switzerland and approved for cystic fibrosis, a rare genetic disease that fills the lungs with thick mucus. Finnegan could not get it from a doctor, because she herself does not have cystic fibrosis. But the baby she was carrying inside her does, and she wanted to start him on the Trikafta as early as possible—before he was even born …
The drugs are officially approved for CF patients as young as 2, but a handful of enterprising mothers in the United States have gotten it prescribed off-label, to treat children diagnosed in the womb. Where doctors are more cautious, mothers are still pushing the limits of when to start the drugs.

Read the full article.