A Gambier Island woman wants to warn seniors about a sophisticated phone scam, which she avoided and hopes they will too.
Judy Weiser, a psychologist and art therapist, among other talents and credentials, is no luddite and to that end, runs her own website and is familiar with coding. But, despite being tech savvy and highly suspicious, Weiser says when a phone call came in with a recorded message from “Canada Post,” she didn’t immediately hang up.
“I have a website. I have a Facebook group with over 10,000 individually approved members,” said Weiser. “I am not one who's easily scammed. I already keep alerting my husband, who's not very tech fluent, that if somebody says, ‘Is this Bob?’ You say, ‘Uh huh.’ You don't say yes, because they record your voice and it can be used for scams and hacks.”
But, when the recorded messages asked her to press one to speak to someone at Canada Post about a package, she didn’t hesitate.
“Well, I have five different packages that I ordered before the [Canada Post employee] strike. Amazon will not deliver to our island, so I pushed one and I got a man's voice,” she said. “So, he said we're investigating a suspicious package that was seized. It had your address on it and it had $16,000 worth of cash, several illegal duplications of fake driver's licenses and blah, blah, blah. And I was like, what?”
The man went on to ask what her address is and despite her suspicions, Weiser felt caught-off-guard and gave it to him.
“And I wasn't smart enough to say, what address does it have on the package? That's my stupid error,” said Weiser. “And he said, I'm going to ask you to read a statement and you need to say it, and please be honest and tell us if it's true. ‘Did you have anything to do with a fraudulent crime of money laundering?’”
Weiser said while she found the exchange slightly amusing, she still wasn’t 100 per cent convinced it wasn’t really Canada Post — or a member of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service — on the line, so she wanted to play it safe by being polite.
“I thought, I have no idea if this is hoax but if it is, it's a good one. So, I said, keep going.”
He then asked her to spell her name. Weiser noticed there were numerous voices in the background as the man spoke and by then she had decided there was something suspicious about the entire conversation, so she asked him for his badge number and which office he was calling from.
“And then he said, this is a very serious crime and if you're not guilty, we'll try to help you get this identity fraud taken care of, but we have to seize your bank account,” said Weiser. “I said, no you don't.”
She then told the man that until she had something in writing that she could show a lawyer, there was no way she was going to let them freeze her bank account.
At that point, Weiser was referred to the man’s “senior investigating officer,” who told her they’d have to get a sworn statement from her.
“And I said, absolutely not. I'm an old lady. I'm turning 80 next summer. I don't do criminal things and you're not going to touch my bank account without something in writing. I'll sue the hell out of you.”
At that point it appeared the scammers decided they had met their match, because they hung up on her. Weiser contacted Coast Reporter in hopes of warning anyone who might get caught in the same situation. She noted, it’s often instinct to immediately try and defend yourself against such an accusation, but she suggests instead to ask for a phone number in order to call them back, create a paper trail by asking for any requests in writing via email, even if it’s legitimate, and contact a friend or family member to ask for an opinion.
“And then, if you think you've been hacked, call the Coast Reporter,” she said. “There's a Quaker concept called bearing witness. If you can't stop a crime, you make sure they know it was witnessed, so that they know that they didn't do it in silence and it's not being forgotten. And that's been my credo my whole life.”
RCMP Const. Karen Whitby said the best thing a person can do to avoid falling victim to a scam is, don’t answer the phone.
“It's my number one. And, to just to be really aware before they start giving out any information and, if it's a business calling them, they can call the business back and look up the phone number themselves.”
Whitby noted the Canada Post scam is rampant right now. In fact, she added, unless you’ve been an actual victim of a scam, there’s no point calling police.
“There’s just too many of them.”
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