Too savvy to be scammed? I was mistaken.

If you are an AARP member, you received its March/April Bulletin with FRAUD in three-inch red letters on the cover. Inside, five articles discussed the increasing problem of scams.

I didn’t read them, thinking I was too savvy to be scammed.

The week after putting the issue into the recycle bin, I fell for a scam. I’m embarrassing myself by telling about it in the hope that my story will warn others.

Last Tuesday morning my email had a message, supposedly from Norton Utilities, saying that $699.99 had been deducted from my checking account for a subscription. It contained a phone number to call immediately if I hadn’t subscribed.

If I’d paused to think, I would have looked for the charge in my checking account. But Norton Utilities is legitimate, and I was alarmed, so I called the number in the email. The refund wasn’t disputed, but processing it involved an extended phone conversation with thick-accented people. I was given a link to a form and cautioned to be careful filling it out because mistakes could not be corrected. An extra 2 and 6 mysteriously appeared before the 699.99 (no $). I was scolded for “a huge mistake” and told I now owed thousands of dollars and should stay on the phone for instructions about how to refund them. 

In retrospect it seems incredible that I did not realize that my computer was being hacked as I filled out the form and, more stupidly, looked at my checking account for the $699.99 and $26,699.99 transactions. My mind was on the Chicago Greeter tour for which I would be late if I didn’t get off the phone. The other person threatened that if I hung up, my bank account would be locked for four months. I finally regained my wits and cut off the call when the instructions involved withdrawing $25,000 in cash immediately, not telling anyone why, and taking the cash to an ATM at another location. 

As I walked downtown for the tour, my phone rang more than a dozen times in the next 20 minutes before I blocked the number. There were also text messages, one of which said, “YOU ARE LIER, THIEF, DON’T DO ANYTHING MADAM OTHER WISE IT WILL COST YOU LOTS OF THING.” 

Along the way I stopped into my bank to freeze my account and made arrangements to come back to change my account number. The teller found that the scammers had moved $23,000 from my money market account into my checking account, proving that they’d been in my hard drive. I had to change the deposit number on my auto-pay bills. I also froze my investment accounts (I already had credit freezes), in case the scammers accessed everything on my computer. 

My niece Sarah knows a college student who is majoring in cybersecurity. She asked his advice, which was to shut down the computer and consult a computer repair person because the scammers probably put malware on it. Two days after the incident I took the computer to a cybersecurity specialist. His investigation found that my computer is safe, but he advised me to pay close attention to financial transactions.

A bigger hassle than changing the bank account was changing passwords. I’d been lazy about changing weak and duplicated ones. Following advice about creating strong passwords, I realized that I’d never remember any and decided it was simpler to let my browser’s password manager create them. I also enabled two-factor authorization whenever possible. 

On Saturday, just as I was feeling more relaxed, I discovered that the bank teller had made the mistake of closing the new checking account, not the old one. I was back to worrying until the branch reopened on Monday.

Everything seems to be fixed now, except my brain. What’s bothering me is not the cybersecurity fee or the lost time but how I could have been so gullible. “There's a Reason Even the Smartest People Fall for Scams,” said a headline at verywellmind.com. It listed many reasons, including “fear reactions that lead us to ignore our logical thought processes.” I was led by emotions and not my brain.

The AARP fraud issue was still in the recycle bin, and I retrieved and read it. Many of the tips were things I’d already done, but it doesn’t hurt to be reminded not to call the number in an email or text or to click on a link. I hope the experience has made me sufficiently suspicious.