You can find anything on the Internet — and so can a thief. A wily crook takes note of the personal information that you’ve conveniently provided on a social networking site like Facebook and uses those details to rid you of as much cash as possible. A column in the Sacramento Bee this weekend gave an example of this distinctly 21st century crime: By peppering an email with references to family members (thanks, Facebook!), a thief in Canada persuaded a woman in California that he was her desperate granddaughter — detained in a jail up north on drug charges. She wired $4,600 in bail money immediately.
A few years ago, I got an email from the vaguest of acquaintances — a person with whom I had exchanged a few emails. She said she’d been robbed at gunpoint of her cash, credit cards and phone. She needed money wired to her hotel. It didn’t make any sense whatsoever. Sure enough, within a matter of hours, I had another email from her; this one was titled “Hacked” and expressed her dismay. I wondered if anyone fell for it — how could they?
But, then again: if you didn’t stop to really think about it… If you thought someone you loved was in trouble and needed your help… Maybe it’s the same sort of principle that fuels most cons — preying on our deepest fears and our deepest desires. Maybe people who fall for a tall tale online are driven by a desire to rescue that’s stronger and louder than the voice of reason that whispers: Hey, why didn’t she call me from the hotel? This is similar to the desire for easy cash that silences any misgivings about a too-good-to-be-true investment. (60% returns…sounds great!)
Here’s a look at how technology figured in the cons of a few of our inductees:
In the early 1970s, Equity Funding sold 60,000 phony life insurance policies. The con was huge; how did it slip beneath the radars of banks, auditors and regulators? Some people wondered if the new-fangled computers that Equity used to track their bogus policies were to blame. A wise person, an early computer expert, discredited this notion in the New York Times; he said that blaming the fraud on computers was “like blaming pencils for all the swindles that happened before.”
There’s no doubt that a con artist will use whatever tools are at his disposal — but sometimes in a less than effective way. Sometimes it’s the technology that does the con artist in. That was the case with the Rastogi brothers, who ran an outrageous international con. They might have gone on making multimillion metal trades out of thin air if it weren’t for a slip of the finger. Instead of faxing a stack of phony documents from one brother to the other, an employee sent them to their auditor. Oops!
Have you ever had a brush with Internet fraud? Heard any good stories about a Nigerian princess in distress or an offer that you just can’t miss, only enter your credit card number here first….?
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