We are living in a kind of golden age for online fraudsters. As the number of apps and services for storing and sending money has exploded – so too have the schemes that bad actors have cooked up to steal that money. Every year, we hear more and more stories of financial heartbreak. What you don't often hear about is what happens after the scam? On today's show, we follow one woman who was scammed out of over $800,000 on her quest to get her money back. That journey takes her from the halls of the FBI to the fraud departments of some of the country's biggest financial institutions. And it offers a window into how the systems that are theoretically designed to help the victims of financial cybercrime actually work in practice. This episode was hosted by Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi and Jeff Guo. It was produced by Willa Rubin and edited by Keith Romer. It was engineered by Neal Rauch and fact-checked by Sierra Juarez. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money's executive producer. Help support Planet Money and hear our bonus episodes by subscribing to Planet Money+ in Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/planetmoney. Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices NPR Privacy Policy
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When you talk to Frances about how she got lured into the scam that's taken over her life for the last year, she says the exact details are a bit of a blur.
It starts with a voicemail, but I was also really sick around that week, so I don't think I.
It just gets fuzzy on how I, like, got into it.
Frances is a white collar worker in her forties, lives in New York, and we're only going to use her first name to protect her professional reputation.
Now, she says, what is clear is that last May, she got this voicemail claiming to be from Citibank flagging this suspicious outgoing wire for $50,000.
Shortly thereafter, I get a text saying, oh, this is David from the security department.
And I'm like the security department for city because of the wire.
Once she gets this guy, David Smith, on the phone, he explains that the suspicious wire, it might be part of a bigger attack on her whole network of accounts.
He asks her to check her Apple account, for example.
And I do see these extraneous, like, these extra charges that are hidden charges on the Apple account.
Pretty soon she's actually getting locked out of her accounts.