Late night caller

The phone rings. It’s late. Your son is calling. The connection to his cell phone is poor. It is hard to make out what he is saying. Something’s wrong. There has been an accident—he is away from home and he needs money. Right away.

Has this happened to you yet? It will. It is only a matter of time.

The caller needs you to wire money to his hotel. You’ve never sent money this way before. The caller has the details and explains it all to you. But you must act now. Something very bad will happen if you don’t get the money to him quickly.

So you pull yourself together, find a money transfer service at a post office or department store (the caller and the late hour will steer you away from using a bank). You send the cash. You wait.

Silence. A day later the phone rings. There’s been a complication. Your son needs more money— sent right away. The same way.

By now you’ve grown suspicious. You decide to call your son’s home in Toronto to verify where he is staying in this far-off locale. Your son answers the phone. A flush of humiliation washes over you. You can’t even bring yourself to tell him what you have done. Not today. You hang up. It’s over. The money is gone.

The story ended better for an 88-year-old Picton resident last week. When her phone rang, it was her granddaughter calling to say she had been in a car accident in Quebec. She needed money immediately. The caller passed the phone to a man who said he was her lawyer. He provided the instructions on how to wire $995 to him through the Post Office. Fortunately for this Picton resident, a sharpeyed Canada Post employee intervened before the money was sent. She’d seen this before. She warned the Picton resident that this was likely a scam. The Picton senior began to put the pieces together and realized she had been conned.

At least she still has her money.

Many others are poorer for this crime. This is a scam that has been repeated over and over in recent months. The stories are mutating and the details are changing but the purpose is still the same: shock parents and grandparents into sending money electronically to untraceable accounts.

How does this happen? How does a con man from who-knows-where get access to the information needed to pull off this scam? The answer is that it is surprisingly easy.

The Internet is awash in information about you and those you love. And those who love and care about you. How does it get there? We put it out there willingly and often thoughtlessly. Or others do. Social media, by definition, is the way many of us share information these days about our lives. It is the way we interact and communicate with our friends, family and colleagues.

Social media has been praised for its power to bring together people and ideas. It has seduced many to believe their select group occupies a small corner of the Internet to converse and share experiences. But of course they aren’t alone. Folks are lurking on the edge trying to figure out how they can take advantage.

My daughter has 500 friends on Facebook. Each one of those folks has a few hundred friends. Despite what Facebook says—they are not all her friends.

Grace is careful to withhold a lot of the personal information Facebook makes available to fill out her profile—but like many of her age, she is infatuated by the technology and immediacy of the connection. She lets her guard down among friends. She leaves plenty of clues in her posts, exchanges with friends and photographs with which to paint a fairly good outline.

Even if she erased it all today—the information would linger and endure for years. She can’t retract it. She can’t take it back. In fact once she posts to Facebook, Tumblr or any other social media site—she has given away control of that information. To anyone who wants it.

In a few years from now I expect my phone will ring. I won’t be surprised how the con men pieced together their story. I just hope I piece it together myself before I send the money.

rick@wellingtontimes.ca