A woman opened up to The Washington Post about an elaborate scam that cost her $600,000 in life savings in the first part of an extensive series launched on Monday.
“Sweepstakes and Nigerian letter scams once dominated fraud prevention workshops,” wrote the Post’s Michelle Singletary.
“We’ve read about pyramid and Ponzi schemes, tech support and telemarketing swindles. And pig butchering — a type of investment scam in which the target’s stake is steadily ‘fattened up,’ usually in the form of cryptocurrency, before the rhetorical slaughter — is a growing concern.”
Meanwhile, she continued, our phones and computers “are inundated by phishing, smishing and vishing attacks, all designed to trick you into giving up personal information” — and artificial intelligence is now being used too. Some scams have even targeted people using Donald Trump’s social media platform.
What brought down Judith Boivin of Maryland, however, was a class of schemes known as government impersonation — where the scammers pose as police or federal agents of some kind, either to scare you into fearing arrest or to make you believe you’re part of an investigation against someone else.
Boivin was first targeted by calls impersonating the Rockville Police Department, who then