About a year and a half ago, 92-year-old Trudy was Googling a recipe when her computer suddenly froze. An error message appeared on the screen, instructing her to call Microsoft internet security.
“I knew about fraud,” Trudy said. “The phone calls and letters that try to get your information. But I had no knowledge that they can control your computer.”
She called the number in the error message and the ensuing conversation led to over eight months of stress and worry.
The man on the other end of the line identified himself as a Microsoft security employee who was going to look into why her computer had suddenly died. He indicated it may be a virus or a scam. He told Trudy he checked her records and saw she had made a past payment of $99.99 to Microsoft for “fraud protection.”
Trudy had no memory of purchasing fraud protection, but she said sometimes her memory is not what it used to be and she thought it sounded legitimate. The man told her the fraud protection clearly had not done its job and Microsoft would like to refund her the money.
But first he needed her bank account information.
Trudy said he sent her a form she filled out electronically. She was told the transaction had to be wired from a bank in New York to her local bank. She provided information for one of her accounts. Then the man told her she had made an error on the electronic form and it mistakenly caused $50,000 to be withdrawn from yet another one of her accounts. He assured her they would fix the error, but it would take at least 48 hours.
At this point, Trudy became alarmed and asked the man his name. “Jack Smith” was the reply, and she said that is when she knew she was being scammed. Over the course of the phone call, she said she had actually spoken to two different men and they both had accents.
“They had Russian or Eastern European accents,” she said. “I knew with that accent he wasn’t a Jack Smith.”
Trudy immediately hung up and called her daughter, who is a lawyer. Her daughter advised her to call the computer technician that had worked for her in the past. Trudy made a lot of phone calls, for a long time, to try to get her money back: to her “computer guy”, to the New York bank, to her own bank, to corporate fraud lawyers, to various government agencies, to insurance companies.
“The banks kept saying they were working on it,” Trudy said. “I was just crazy. “
Trudy has high blood pressure and a few other physical conditions that flared up under the stress and anxiety of losing so much money, she said. At one point she said she did not want to get sick over it anymore, and was ready to move on.
“I could still put food on the table,” she said.
Before she gave up on ever seeing the $50,000 again, an employee at her bank called to tell her they had her money. The employee asked what account she would like it deposited in. But Trudy said she “was not falling for that again.”
She hung up with the employee and called the bank back to make sure it was not another scammer looking for her information. It was not another scam. She was told her bank and the New York bank had worked together on her case to recover the money.
The next day, after eight long months, all of the money was back in her bank account.
“I still don’t know what did it. I’m persistent. All my calls to banks and the government?,” she said. “But I was really in heaven after that.”
Trudy lives in California and travels to Door County to visit family here. She has children and grandchildren that she talks to or sees regularly. She lives in a building that is “full of lawyers,” she said.
She said she knows how lucky she was to have her money returned and feels grateful. She wants other seniors who may be targeted by scam artists to not be too embarrassed to get help, and that these criminals can be very convincing.
“Your whole life is available online,” she said. “Don’t tell them anything.”