‘Don’t do it’ Sheriff warns of fraud and scam schemes

“Slowly but surely, the rest of the world is sneaking into our little Mayberry here, so we need to be a little bit careful.”

That was the central theme of a fraud and scam prevention talk by Big Horn County Sheriff Ken Blackburn at the October 20 Lovell Area Chamber of Commerce luncheon.

Blackburn began his presentation by joking, “I’d really like to stay, but I’m going to have to be brief. I’ve got to go. I have a rich uncle in Dubai, five times removed, and I just need to go up to Walmart real quick and get five gift cards so I can send it to the attorney, so that I can get that letter here and get my inheritance.”

He continued, “Stupid as that sounds, that’s only slightly removed from what we get about every week. I think fraud plays on our emotions. I look at a lot of people around here, and we have some late baby boomers and that age group of people, and I think we were raised on a lot of values, a lot of really positive values of honesty and trust and believing in people. And that’s really good when we’re dealing with people face to face.

“But when the internet came and started getting involved in things, they were able to add that anonymity in, and you can see that in the pervasive things of the Internet, whether it be pornography, whether it be the various different memes.”

People executing fraud schemes in one fashion or another will do everything they can to get to a victim and take as much money as they can, Blackburn said, adding, “These people have no scruples.” He recalled an incident with a “good member of the community” who was dealing with a scammer, and Blackburn got on the phone with the scammer and asked, “Do you really think this is going to work?” And the scammer replied, “It works more often than you would ever realize.”

“And then they terminated the conversation and hung up on me,” he said.

One FBI fraud and abuse hotline Blackburn knows of receives more than 100,000 reports a day, but he said fraud cases are extremely difficult to prosecute since they usually originate out of the country. He said he can think of only about two cases successfully prosecuted in the area since he’s been sheriff.

He said local banks are excellent to work with, but they themselves can get hit, as with the recent “jackpotting” scheme run by “foot soldiers” of the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua criminal organization that struck local banks a few months ago. Working with the Lovell, Greybull and Thermopolis police departments, the FBI, the Secret Service and U.S. Department of Treasury, the sheriff’s office was able to help track down the perpetrators, and multiple arrests were made, which could lead to deportation or lengthy prison sentences. However, the chances of recovering any of the $75,000 or so in stolen money from the area are slim, he said.

The sheriff urged local businesses to immediately call their bank if they suspect a case of fraud or counterfeiting, and he said it’s far easier to learn what a bill should look like than memorizing the myriad ways counterfeiting would change it. In fact, that’s how the Secret Service does it, he said.

He passed out information from the office of the Wyoming Attorney General to everyone in attendance that included topics such as prepaid gift cards, family emergency scams, lottery and sweepstakes scams, jury duty scams, “free” trial offers, utility scam, tech support scams and more.

Internet schemes

Blackburn urged those in attendance to be extremely careful with information they put on the internet, noting that fraud and scam schemes are cunning in how they operate.

“They’re all insidious, and they evolve so fast,” he said. “Now, with AI, they’re getting better and better all the time, but there are some interesting ways and things that you can do to catch these.”

Think of the well-known grandparent scam where “little Johnny” has supposedly been jailed by authorities in Mexico, and in order to “bail him out,” Grandpa must send money, Blackburn said.

“Here’s what the deal is: They have all the information, because every time you get on the internet, every time you like something, every time you do something, it takes a note, believe it or not. What they’re doing is they’re collecting all of our data. They’re getting names every time you fill out one of those little surveys. Have you ever done these things ‘check if you’ve done it?’ They’re pulling data on you.

“Those are phishing schemes. Every one of those on the internet that you fill out – ‘You know you’re from the 70s, if you’ve ever used a rotary telephone, if you’ve ever used a cassette tape recorder, if you’ve ever rolled up a cassette tape recorder with your pencil’ – and by the way, I had done every one of them from the 70s. So those are all collecting your information. I will not fill those out and submit them anymore, because they are just taking data.”

Advertisers are constantly mining a person’s smartphone for date and interests, Blackburn said. He said in the case of one person he knows, the FBI found 1.5 million data points on his phone that the agency removed.

“How many of you ever read George Orwell’s novel ‘1984?’ Well, I read it for college,” Blackburn said. “It’s about a utopian world where Big Brother knows everything. We are living in a Big Brother world. If you have your phone, it is taking pictures of you. It is spying on you as we speak.”

Companies and scammers are “constantly reading our emotions and diagnosing our weak spots and work to capitalize on these,” Blackburn said, through algorithms and other methods that can be used for product sales or sent to the dark web.

“I’m not saying tape something over your camera eye, and I’m not saying disable this or go back to a flip phone or anything like that, but the more information you put into that phone, the more you can expect to come out of it,” he said.

Extortion issues

Another major issue is “catfishing,” where scammers prey on lonely good-hearted people seeking a friend or wanting to help someone. In many cases an online matchmaking service is totally legitimate, and sometimes the contact is just a person seeking companionship, he said, but in other cases the victim is drawn into a scheme that forces them to send money – lots of money.

“They start talking to each other, and somebody, sooner or later, gives some shred of information that’s really, really sensitive, and then they start capitalizing on it,” Blackburn said. “Sometimes, people share pictures. That’s what we see quite a lot of here. They share pictures, and as soon as the victim shares a picture of themselves to the suspect, then they immediately start extorting them for money. The average in Big Horn County is $3,000 to $5,000 before somebody finally realizes this is a problem and calls the sheriff’s office. They have already given them (money) to stay quiet, and these people continue to extort them for more money before they realize that they’ve just drained their bank account and they need to call for help.”

Blackburn said he knows of one case in Big Horn County in which a person ended up sending some $50,000 over the course of several months in what he called a “diamond scheme” before the victim realized they were being scammed.

“Let me tell you, if somebody is promising you something and they’re having you send them the money first, it is a scam,” he said. “You try to convince that (fact) to your (loved ones) when they’re caught with that. We just had to evict someone out of her home who was so convinced that somebody was going to rescue her and take her out of a situation that she was sending them an unbelievable amount of gift cards every month. She wasn’t paying her mortgage and her bills, and she ultimately had to be evicted.

“The bad people are capitalizing on people’s loneliness and their desire to have a friend and someone that they could trust. They are not stupid; they are not bad. They have a weak spot to exploit. When I was teaching DARE 100 years ago, I always said, if somebody tells you not to say something, that’s exactly when you should tell the cops or your parents. And this is the same thing.”

Some cases even lead to suicide, Blackburn said, when a victim reached the end of the rope or a young person is caught in a “sextortion” case.

“That’s what we’re dealing with on a daily basis right now in Wyoming, and that’s the realities of what we’re facing in your communities,” the sheriff said.

Bank help

Chamber president Cameron Miller, an officer at the Bank of Lovell, introduced Charis Bischoff of First Bank, Kisha McArthur from Big Horn Federal and Tori Bassett from Sunlight Federal Credit Union, and he urged those in attendance to call their local bank or credit union if they have any questions at all regarding fraud or a scam.

He also urged people to pay attention to alerts sent from their bank or credit card company when the institution suspects that a transaction may be fraudulent.

“I don’t think our community realizes how good our banks are,” Blackburn said. “I would venture 35% of our reports, our serious reports, come from somebody at the bank that notices something that’s off and gets us started on something. And I’m really impressed with that, that they care enough about somebody’s account. … They do not violate the confidentiality. They ask for advice, and we work to the point that we can get permission and work with the person to help them out of that situation.”

Blackburn warned people to never click on unsolicited texts or emails if they don’t know who the sender is, noting, “I get those every once in a while, too. But it’s just a random number, and it says, ‘Hi, how are you doing today?’ It could be anybody; it could be a friend. So they’re just hoping somebody responds, and then they can start phishing. Don’t do it. Block it, report it to spam, delete it, be done with it. Don’t even mess with it.”

Blackburn also touched on fraudulent warrants, credit monitoring companies, Facebook friend requests and false charities.