It is absolutely wild to me that there are grown, presumably mentally competent adults out there who are willing to (1) answer their phones and then (2) stay on the phone for hours with a stranger and do what they say. At no point did this lady do even the bare minimum of critical pushback.

“If you talk to an attorney, I cannot help you anymore,” Michael said sternly. “You will be considered noncooperative. Your home will be raided, and your assets will be seized. You may be arrested. It’s your choice.” This seemed ludicrous. I pictured officers tramping in, taking my laptop, going through our bookshelves, questioning our neighbors, scaring my son. It was a nonstarter. “Can I just come to your office and sort this out in person?” I said. “It’s getting late, and I need to take my son trick-or-treating soon.” “My office is in Langley,” he said. “We don’t have enough time. We need to act immediately. I’m going to talk you through the process. It’s going to sound crazy, but we must follow protocol if we’re going to catch the people behind this.” He explained that the CIA would need to freeze all the assets in my name, including my actual bank accounts. In the eyes of the law, there was no difference between the “real” and the fraudulent ones, he said. They would also deactivate my compromised Social Security number and get me a new one. Then, by monitoring any activity under my old Social Security number and accounts, they would catch the criminals who were using my identity and I would get my life back. But until then, I would need to use only cash for my day-to-day expenses. It was far-fetched. Ridiculous. But also not completely out of the realm of possibility. “Do I have any other options?” I asked. “Unfortunately, no,” he said. “You must follow my directions very carefully. We do not have much time.” He asked me how much cash I thought I would need to support myself for a year if necessary. My assets could be frozen for up to two years if the investigation dragged on, he added. There could be a trial; I might need to testify. These things take time. “I don’t know, $50,000?” I said. I wondered how I would receive paychecks without a bank account. Would I have to take time off from work? I did some mental calculations of how much my husband could float us and for how long. “Okay,” he said. “You need to go to the bank and get that cash out now. You cannot tell them what it is for. In one of my last cases, the identity thief was someone who worked at the bank.”

When I did tell friends what had happened, it seemed like everyone had a horror story. One friend’s dad, a criminal-defense attorney, had been scammed out of $1.2 million. Another person I know, a real-estate developer, was duped into wiring $450,000 to someone posing as one of his contractors. Someone else knew a Wall Street executive who had been conned into draining her 401(k) by some guy she met at a bar.

Man, I'm in the wrong business, apparently the petite-bourgeoise are easy as hell to scam.

More than a good chunk of people make in a year, she just lit it on fire.

Amazing work.

if i didn't want to get scammed i would just not answer my phone if the call is from a strange number pls hire me ny mag

Hello, I'm the King of Uyghurland. If you give me $100,000 in the form of barrows of pennies to be dropped off at the Mexican border, Xi will be finished.

This reminds me of a prank I pulled on a friend back when I was in college. I had just discovered ip-relay.com which did Type to Speech with a real human being that would say everything you typed to whomever you had them call, and then they would type back the other person's response to you. The funny thing was the person answering the call had to say "go ahead" after everything they said in order for the agent to type back to me so it was a little ridiculous to use for pranking.

Anyway I told him I was with Microsoft's legal team and we had been monitoring his piracy for years and we had someone on the way to his house to confiscate his computer. The agent I had doing the call must have been into helping me pull this off because they went above and beyond to tell me what background sounds they heard and what they could make out when he started whispering to his mom.

I was rolling on the floor and my dormmate got curious and wanted to know what I was doing. When he read through the conversation he busted out laughing too and started helping me figure out what to say next.

By the end of our conversation we had told his mom that we had agents on a flight -- out to his tiny little town out in the middle of nowhere, which doesn't even have an airport -- and that no one was to leave the premises until the agents arrived,nor should they even think about touching the computer. They agreed not to go anywhere or do anything with the computer.

Then his mom got the brilliant idea to say "wait, how do we know this isn't a prank?" At this point I wondered if they had just been playing along and I was the fool, but I froze up, not knowing how to respond. My dormmate pushed me out of the way and typed "Ma'am, I don't believe I have laughed once, go ahead." and the response back from her was "I'm sorry, we'll wait for the agents to arrive, go ahead."

We laughed our fool heads off about this for days, not knowing fully whether or not it was a great prank or if they were actually messing with us.

I found out about a week later from another friend in the same town that while we were on the phone with his mom, my friend had ripped the harddrive out of his computer and threw it into the creek behind his house.

Then that same night they went out to WalMart and bought a new hard drive and Windows XP and he put it in and installed the legit OS.

I couldn't believe it. I honestly didn't think they actually bought it not least because of the whole "go ahead" thing, but they did, and then I felt bad so I never told him it was me.

lmao, she lives in a $4,000,000 house and is related to the Roosevelts:

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This whole thing keeps getting funnier and funnier.