Getting scammed online was a reminder that there are no easy fixes

This article Getting scammed online was a reminder that there are no easy fixes was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

I went to a farm stand last month and paid cash for beets and cabbage. I was surrounded by frilly summer splendor (lettuces and herbs), but I wanted solid storage crops for some reason. I passed legal tender to the woman who grew the orange, red and green orbs of various sizes. The only thing that would have made the transaction more virtuous is if I had biked the four miles there or worked in the rows for a few hours in exchange for my produce.

Still, it felt close to perfectly virtuous — and I needed that.

I got scammed recently. I lost $1,000. That isn’t right. I paid the wrong person, in the wrong way, and all I got was a tough life lesson on Facebook scams and the impenetrability and unaccountability of Facebook, Venmo and my own bank.

I take a lot of responsibility for this error, for falling for this scam. It looked like my friend’s Facebook account. It was a good deal. My friend was offering all her sister-in-law’s things for sale, as she helped her family member move into managed care. Cars, household gadgets, kitchen appliances, a lawn mower — all the trappings of a comfortable middle-class life were for sale for half or less than what they were worth. The catch seemed reasonable too.

My friend was traveling, helping the sister-in-law actually move into the nursing home and all this needed to go fast. So, to make things easy and fair, we were asked to put a hold on the items we wanted with a deposit, which we’d get back if we didn’t want the item when she got back. There was urgency, but some order, a system.

If it had been a stranger, we would have moved on past. But my husband and I know this woman. We used to go to church with her and her family. We travel in the same circles. We trust her. We’d be helping her out and of course we’d get the money back if it wasn’t the thing we wanted.

What was that thing, you ask? A 2014 Toyota Cressida — a hybrid, dark red midsize car with just 43,000 miles on it for less than $5,000. Too good to be true? Almost, but under the circumstances, with the back story… plausible? Too plausible as it turned out.

When I reached out via Messenger — with compassion for my friend’s plight and gratitude for her good care of her family member — the response was short, impersonal and perfunctory. A busy woman, I thought. I get it, let’s get down to business. A few bits of information back and forth and then the ask: $1,000 down, to be sent via Venmo. I hardly hesitated. But I did hesitate. The recipient wasn’t my friend. It was another name. The sister-in-law, I assumed. Makes sense. I pressed send, and was met by the cautionary pre-send Venmo: “Are you sure?” Yes, I clicked. My friend responded swiftly: “Send me a screenshot of the payment.” I did, even though I am 50 and making a screenshot was a new skill to learn on the fly. We made plans for 10 a.m. on Saturday, and I went to bed.

But now — too late of course — there was doubt. The red flags waved. No comments on the Facebook post. (Comments were turned off, actually, which I didn’t even know you could do.) There were odd turns of phrase. And what about the sister-in-law? I went back to my friend’s Facebook page, looking for the name. Surely she’d be listed as one of her friends. No. I looked at the post again, and noticed that a few people had posted mad faces. I reached out to one of those mad faces asking why. While waiting for the response, I filled in the blanks: She thinks the sister-in-law is using our friend. Our friend is doing too much. Where is the husband/brother in all this? Of course, it was none of that, as it turned out. Our mutual friend responded: “SCAM. Our friend’s Facebook has been hacked, and I’ve been had!”

I screenshot everything, desperate to use my brand new skill to collect evidence for some impending tribunal. In the morning, I messaged the scammer and demanded my money back. I was promptly blocked. Mistake number 15 or 16, as that kept me from being able to do anything to warn other viewers of this too-good-to-be-true post for someone with more than a thousand Facebook friends.

Right at 9 a.m. I went to my bank, confident they could reverse the payment. The bank clerk was so nice and so apologetic, and by the way her husband works for Public Works in Sanitation and was collecting garbage on my street as we spoke. Small world, but big money bureaucracy. There was no way for the bank to reverse an ACH withdrawal. She told me how to connect via text to a real live person at Venmo, saving me hours of poking around a not-very-helpful website.

Unfortunately, Carissa in Venmo customer chat was just as impotent as my friendly bank clerk. There was nothing they would do because I authorized the transaction and clicked “yes” when given a minute to think about how well I knew this person and how confident I was that they were legit. She didn’t say all that, but it was implied. The Venmo woman suggested that I “request payment” of $1,000 from the woman who scammed me. The scammer immediately declined my request.

I was still standing with the bank teller through this whole exchange, so she suggested that I file a police report and send that to Venmo. I left the bank and headed down to my local police station. I’ve only been there once or twice, waiting for friends to get processed out after arrests at General Dynamics/Electric Boat protests. The waiting room is cinder blocks dressed in bright kids’ murals — a message of welcome that is mostly contradicted by the tiny slots in plexiglass that I am consigned to communicate through. I was told to wait for an available officer. I waited.

While waiting, I wondered if this really was a crime. I was not burglarized or mugged. No one broke a window or rifled through my drawers. I offered it up. I paused in my scrolling, wanted something, got caught up in the false urgency, and sent away pretend money that turned out to be very real.

A young officer swathed in thousands of dollars of gear and accompanied by a silent officer-in-training came out to the waiting room. We stood and they asked a few questions. I was befuddled by the lack of forms, pens, blank spaces for my answers, the patient spelling out of certain words. He just listened, and then told me that the New London Police Department doesn’t have the resources or the jurisdiction to go after internet scams.

“They are getting very good,” he said. He shared a story of almost falling for an online scam himself. He left and came back with a police report number written on a piece of scrap paper. “Write this number down,” he said. “You’ll need it when you file your report with the FBI.”

The FBI? I laughed at the irony of going to the Federal Bureau of Investigations for help, thinking maybe they’ll see my last name and make my case their highest priority — just as putting my father and uncle behind bars with dirty tricks and spurious prosecutions was their highest priority half a century ago. But, in times of extremity, vulnerability and anxiety, it is nice to have something to do, even reporting my kinda, sorta robbery to the FBI. I logged onto their website and filed a report. I got a case number, but all of sudden there were no more tasks to do.

So, I thought about money. What is it? Why are people willing to screw each other for it? The Facebook scammer is a small screw, but isn’t Facebook itself a big scam? Offering connection and community, but really taking our information, manipulating our wants and needs, serving us up to advertisers (the ultimate scammers). Facebook is worth more than $1 trillion. Venmo is worth $38 billion. My own bank has $7.5 billion in assets.

Then I thought about technology. Why do I post and scroll, why do I like and comment? Why is that better than picking up the phone, or hopping on my bike to really connect with the people I care about on the issues that affect us all. Why am I still on these platforms that suck all the joy out of even the sweetest moments — and reduce everything to a single conversation? There is an occasional meme, reconnection or life moment — marriage proposals, births and deaths mostly — that keep me coming back. It is not enough.

I thought about vengeance. I was so angry at being had. I couldn’t be mad at my friend, she has been hacked. I had the Venmo name, but she was likely hacked too. There was some person or group who had done this, but they were hidden behind many layers, they could be anyone, anywhere. I was angry at myself — and my husband — for being rubes. There was shame there too. It was an unfamiliar collection of feelings — uncomfortable and itchy — to be angry and ashamed but without a clear adversary in all that. I understood, in a flash, how that could all coalesce into generalized suspicion, inchoate hatred and a kind of an easily weaponized powerlessness.

Finally, I thought about what is behind the money and the technology: the military. We give more than $800 billion a year, year after year, to the U.S. military. We live with it. We have accepted it. Even I, die-hard pacifist though I aspire to be, live with the military, unable to fully withdraw my complicity from its operations any more than I can unbank myself or unplug from social media.

In the weeks since the scam, I have reflected a lot on how quickly my husband and I were able to go from impulse buyers to swindled suckers — all thanks to the code and bytes and networks that allowed for the scam. It was too easy and too fast. We don’t even understand the mechanics of the transfer.

That’s what we need to be suspicious of: the lures of capitalism’s underbelly, the easy and the fast. It is the false promise of militarism too, isn’t it? Just bomb this place and make ‘em pay. A show of force will teach them a lesson and send them running. It will be a cakewalk.

War isn’t fast and easy, it is slow and expensive, a brutal bloodletting. The craters and wounds fester from generation to generation. Violence brings more violence, and more and more. We can look afar to the Gaza Strip, to Tel Aviv, to the West Bank to know that this is true. But we can also see it — feel it — closer to home.

Nonviolent resolution is hard work. It’s a slow building of trust, mutuality and care. It requires truth, accountability, a balancing of the scales, justice — and then the prize: reconciliation, rebuilding. There is no easy fix. But peace is worth the hard work.

I was still thinking about this a week after being scammed, when I harvested 96 bulbs of garlic. I had planted them last November, when the ground was almost frozen. It was hard work to bury the perfect cloves. “Have a good winter,” I whispered, as I covered them up. The green shoots shot up in the spring, robust and gorgeous, sending out pungent, curly scapes. I clipped them and ground them up with oil, walnuts and salt for spring pesto. The tall stems eventually browned and dried, signaling that the garlic bulbs were ready to harvest. One after another, I pulled them out of the ground, forking the soil gently so they’d come out whole. I brushed the dirt off, and laid them in the attic to dry. Ninety-six bulbs of garlic. My biggest harvest yet — 10 months in the making, hard work and labor on both sides.

Online, perfect garlic bulbs like mine can fetch $4 a piece, so I feel $384 richer. If I had another 154 bulbs, I could call it even! But it doesn’t work like that. And I don’t think I want it to. I am a little wiser. No more Venmo. No more too good to be true. No more fast and easy. The dirt under my fingernails will tell me the worth of things.

This article Getting scammed online was a reminder that there are no easy fixes was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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Source: https://wagingnonviolence.org/2024/10/getting-scammed-online-was-a-reminder-that-there-are-no-easy-fixes/