The Colorado State Open Thread is for people interested in all things Colorado, be they in regular (meat) space, the natural environment, or even cyberspace. The biggest thing on my mind right now is the narrow probable escape I managed to make from a relatively sophisticated set of scam artists. Keep reading if you’d like the story. Skip down to the lower section of the diary to learn about last week’s quiz photo and keep on going into the comments to let us know what you’d like to talk about.
Around noon today, I answered the phone when it was handed to me by Mrs. Colotim. I didn’t see who the caller ID identified it as. The person on the other end identified herself as Amelia and said she was calling from CenturyLink, the phone and DSL Internet company I maintain as a backup in case my main fiber optic link goes down. She reported that they had been trying to send a security update to my router for a few weeks but my router was not upgrading. She first asked if I had made any changes to the router and when I said “No” she asked if she could try it again. I’ve been the tech on the other end of network upgrades, and usually upgrades work, but not always, so I’ve done some of this stuff before. She asked me to go to a website for a remote control software program, Team Viewer, which I have used before to take over computers remotely. I downloaded and installed the software. I had some minor alarm bells ringing in my head, but it was still not absolutely out of the ordinary and seemed to be cutting a couple of corners in part because I had not authorized CenturyLink to do this by calling them first, but since I also had been on the CenturyLink tech support team (and before that Qwest, before CL bought Qwest and before that Colorado Supernet before Qwest bought Supernet), I was pre-disposed to like and part-way trust their techs. I know you have a head start on disbelieving her because of my diary title, but while she had a few errors in her talk, I put that down to her probably being a Level 1 tech who had a strict set of things she was allowed to try and not someone cleared for in-depth analysis or independent thought. She did have me enter in a couple of commands as well to bring up answers to prompts and they fit somewhat well with what I was seeing. Not perfectly, but good enough for a Level 1 tech. Her foreign accent also was appropriate from CenturyLink.
She also had me do a speed test using CenturyLink’s site. When I read her off the results, she said that was too slow and suggested that I was paying for speed and services that I wasn’t receiving so I should be getting a refund. Ah, the hook of free / undeserved money. The results were not fast, but they were about what I was paying for. Still, I allowed her to transfer me to “billing” to have them credit my account.
I wound up speaking with “Sandy” who was a foreign speaker as well. He asked for me to log into my bank account to check and see if the transfer of the $300 credit had been received. He knew the two banks that I bank with, and which one was the current one for CenturyLink. When I told him it hadn’t (and I wasn’t expecting it to be immediate), he acted confused and then he asked me to bring up another remote access window on my system and in a Unix style window, he asked me to answer some questions that appeared by typing in the answers directly. The information was not asking for banking information — account number, full SSN, password or login, and he was able to make a couple of deposits to the account, but the commas for the amounts were in the wrong places. They also said **UNAUTHORIZED TRANSFER** which of course really started the alarm bells ringing. Instead of $300, however, the software wouldn’t allow the “.” to be typed for the cents, so when I tried to type 300.00 it put 30000 into the account, or $30,000. “Sandy” became immediately flustered and said he needed to call his manager to see how they could reverse this transfer or he would be in trouble with CenturyLink for possibly trying to either steal or moneywash a transfer of funds. He and his manager didn’t want to involve the legal side of CenturyLink and they were doing some things to try and avoid this. They sent me to a website where it gave me a choice of letting the legal side handle it with a lawsuit, presumably targeting me for theft, or if I were to pay the money back by the end of the day, the legal side would be avoided.
To pay it back, “Sandy” and his website had three options. The first was to go through a bank transfer with 14-30% penalty (taxes, he called it), paying through an ATM the money in cash but it would be a bitcoin ATM and I’d have to put the $30,000 into a bitcoin wallet and then deposit that the way they told me to. That was not the way a reputable company like CenturyLink would operate and “Sandy” and his manager boss “Kevin” were in favor of this because they could hide this transaction and legal would never have to hear of it. The third method of payment was something I couldn’t figure out and they couldn’t explain it to me. “Kevin” told me that I would need to have him call me on my cell and then I would need to keep him on the line so he could walk me through the ATM and payment process. It wouldn’t matter that it’s 20-30 minutes to the bank and that I had some things to do before I could go out on this errand.
By this point, I had made my mind up to go to the police station rather than the bank. I turned off my computer to end any further computer connections and discussed everything with the Mrs. and we decided to hope that we got to keep the $30,000. Well, I drove to the police station and while doing that, I called my bank and had my account numbers changed.
I was delayed in posting this diary because a Larimer County deputy called me to go over the details, create a case report and he gave me the steps to go through so that the harm is minimized. They are:
- Go to www.ftc.gov and click on the link to fill out an ID theft report
- Contact the bank to get all account numbers changed (already done)
- Contact all three credit bureaus to report the ID theft, including any report numbers.
- The deputy is checking my drivers license and ID to make sure no false ID’s are being created based off my info. I never did give up my DL number, but we can’t be too sure.
- I will send him copies of any phone numbers they called me with and I have a screen shot of their solution to keep it out of the legal department’s hands.
The Deputy says that hundreds of Larimer county folk are being scammed, sometimes despite the police and sheriff’s office’s best efforts, and this may not yield anything but I was at least ahead of things enough (I think) that I may have avoided losing money to this. I will definitely have to keep more alert, especially in these next few days until all the accounts are updated with the changes.
Yuck.
The art festival had lots of displays of art (many different materials — photography on the left tent, copper art on the right tent, many different woodworking items, paintings, beadwork, many photographs, varieties of food, metal art and a silent auction tent. The silent auction was to raise money for a deceased elk who was the modern equivalent of Samson, a beloved local elk who was shot by a bowhunter many years ago. The new elk was named “Kahuna” as in, “The Big Kahuna”. He apparently perished in March of this year from wounds suffered in the rut last fall, but he was much photographed and beloved around town and up in the Park. The money will go towards some form of memorial. Samson has a statue just off downtown along US 36 and he’s lit up with Christmas lights every year.
I’m done typing and it’s about 7:30. Please contribute whatever thoughts you might have down below and be very careful about phone calls, emails or other unsolicited invitations. The floor is yours.
Here’s my final thought for the scammers.