I’ve been scammed online – what are 5 things I should do immediately?

Ralph Estep Jr.
00:00:01

Have you ever felt that sickening feeling in your stomach when you realize you've been scammed online? Maybe you're dealing with it right now. Your bank account drained, credit cards maxed out, or maybe your identity has been stolen. Well today, I'm going to share three powerful stories of recovery and the exact steps you need to take, and listen, these are in the first 24 hours after discovering you've been scammed.

Narrator
00:00:27

Welcome to the Ask Ralph Podcast where listening to an experienced financial professional with over 30 years of experience can help you make sense of confusing questions, current headlines and industry trends about taxes, small business, financial decision making, investment strategies, and even the art of proper budgeting. Ask Ralph makes the complex simple by sharing his real world knowledge from a Christian perspective with all things financial.

Now here's your Host, Ralph Estep Jr.

Ralph Estep Jr.
00:00:56

Thank you for joining me today. Today's topic is one that affects many of us. And I'm going to share some immediate things you can do right now within the first 24 hours if you find that you're a victim of being scammed online. Now, if you missed yesterday's show, I talked about five key considerations before using that credit card for purchasing your groceries. Listen, I agree. It's great to leverage those credit card rewards, but we got to avoid the debt trap. So I'm going to encourage you to check it out if you missed it.

Well, today's question comes from Tiffany from Michigan. I'm going to tell you ahead of time, buckle up. This is a tough one today. "Dear Ralph, I'm sitting here with tears in my eyes as I write this. Yesterday, I discovered I was scammed out of $5,000 through what I thought was a legitimate Christian investment group. The scammer seems so genuine. He quoted scripture, talked about his church ministry, and even prayed with me over the phone. He promised the investment would help fund missionary work while giving me a 30% return in just two months. I'm a single mom with three kids and this money was part of my emergency fund.

I feel so ashamed and stupid. How could I, as a Christian woman who usually makes careful decisions fall for this? The worst part is this. I recommended this opportunity to my Bible study group before even discovering it was a scam. Now I'm not just dealing with a financial loss, but also the guilt of potentially harming others in my church family. I haven't told anyone yet, not even my pastor. I'm paralyzed with fear and don't know what steps to take first. Please help me know what to do in these first critical hours."

Well Tiffany, I am so sorry for what you're going through. And it is absolutely amazing how people prey on believers. It just drives me crazy. So today I'm going to give you some immediate steps to take that you can use today, Tiffany, and for the rest of you listening, these are things you can do within the first 24 hours to try to stop the bleeding when this happens to you. Now maybe you've got questions like Tiffany. Well, here's a great way to get those questions answered. You can join me tonight. And every Tuesday night at 7:00 PM Eastern time as I go live with the Ask Ralph live show. It's a great place to get your questions answered.

You can take part in our community. You get to it by going to askralphpodcast.com/live. And here's the best part. Every week, I'm giving away a hundred-dollar Amazon gift card to a lucky listener. That's right. All you've got to do is be a member of the audience during the show. I'll give you a way to access the drawing and you can walk away a hundred dollars richer and also get your questions answered. So again, to join our live show, go to askralphpodcast.com/live.

Now Tiffany, you've got a heartbreaking situation going on. And you know I always like to start the show with some scripture. And this story reminds me of 2 Timothy 1:7, which tells us, "For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind." And Tiffany, I hope that's particularly meaningful for you today. When we've been victims of fraud, we often feel powerless. We feel ashamed that our minds race with worry. But this, and listen, this is huge.

You've got to remember this. God promises something different for us. He gives us power to take action. He gives us love to forgive ourselves in a sound mind to make wise decisions moving forward. Now Tiffany, I know you might be feeling victimized, but God equips us with tools to recover. He gives us tools to go stronger. And that's exactly our mission today. My goal is to transform you from a victim to a Victor. So let's get right to it.

I thought I'd start today with some shocking statistics. And these will blow your mind. Last year, Americans lost over $6.9 billion and that's B, billion dollars to online scams. These online scams, the average victim lost $8,500. And what's even worse, scammers are targeting faith. Because, and here's the reason. They target people of faith because as people of faith, we naturally have a tendency to trust people. And what's the morale, the story before we get too deep, we've got to be wise. So let me share three powerful stories of recovery that will help you understand some of the immediate actions you need to take if you find yourself in this situation. So Tiffany, take some notes because I'm going to lay it out for you. Let's start with story number one. And I'll call this one, Martha's tech support nightmare. So let me tell you about Martha. Martha is a dedicated, devoted church member in her 70's. And what did Martha get?

She got that common message on her computer. A lot of us have seen this. Pops up and it says your computer has been infected. Now 9 times out of 10 that's because you've got spyware, you went to a website that infected your computer. Now listen. I've seen this on my own screens. Now I use Apple. I don't see it quite as often, but even on the Apple computers, I'm starting to see this.

So Martha's sitting there checking her email or doing whatever she was doing on her computer. And all of a sudden, she gets this pop-up message. And unfortunately, she started following it. The scammer was posing as a Microsoft support tech. She got on the phone with this guy. And she told me, she said, Ralph, this guy even quoted scripture. He said, oh, listen to this verse and Hey Martha, it's so great to meet you.

And you know, you're blessed to have me to help you. Well, we can look at it now and say, what was he doing? He was gaining her trust. And what did Martha do? She trusted them. That's the kind of person Martha is. And she gave him remote access. And that was it. With remote access, the scammer drained her checking account. They took her for $3,200. And it was quick.

Martha said it was like, it was a evaporation Ralph, it was like vapor. But here's what she did. And these were her keys to recovery. And these are things that I think you need to immediately do if you find yourself in this situation. Number one thing she did. She called her bank to freeze all of her accounts.

That's the first thing you want to do. Get in contact with your bank and put a freeze on all your accounts. And I know that's going to be inconvenient because you're going to have to find other ways to make your bill payments and cover your expenses for a few days, but you want to stop the bleeding. So you got to call your bank right away and freeze your accounts.

The next thing she immediately did. She went back on that computer. She changed every single password that she had on her computer. I mean, every single one of them. That's really important because if you've been compromised, the best thing you can do is go to each of those websites or those online sources you work with, change those passwords, make sure you add that multifactor authentication. Some people call it two factor authentication. That one is immensely important. What a third thing she did was she immediately filed a police report. And I'm going to tell you, a lot of times the police get annoyed with you. They're like, oh yeah, I'm sorry about your luck, too bad, but they have to take a police report. So go and have a police report filed.

They might not come out to your house. In fact, you probably won't but you can usually get a desk officer or something like that to give you a case number, get that information cause you're going to need it. And last but not least the fourth thing she did was she contacted all three credit bureaus. And she put out a hold on her account.

She put a notice on her account so that anybody tried to apply for credit using her for information, they will be stopped, and she'd be able to address those things. Now, what was the result? Because she was swift, here's the beautiful part of this. Martha recovered 80% of her money. It's like I said, she called her bank to freeze her account.

She changed every password. She filed a police report, and she contacted all three credit bureaus. So if you're listening today and Tiffany, these are the things you should be doing right now to help mitigate that and help reduce that loss. Well, let's look at number two and I call this David's small business nightmare.

I know I use David a lot on the show and if you listen, you know, I never use clients real names. I never want to, you know, break through that barrier of keeping their information private. So let me tell you about David. Now David runs a Christian bookstore. Now David's one of these guys, he works with regular suppliers. And he got an invoice by email, and this was a business he knew well. He worked with them routinely. What David didn't know is that the scammer had spoofed their vendors email, and they sent him this fraudulent invoice. And in that invoice was an altered payment link. Now, this is the same method he usually used, but it looked normal. But then David said after the fact, he said, you know, I did think it was strange.

The invoice was so large. And he said, the other thing, Ralph was they normally give me 30-day payment terms, but this invoice demanded immediate payment. And he said, but I was busy. I was trying to get to the next thing. And I said, you know what? This is a vendor. You know, if I've got a small credit with them down the road, that's fine. So he paid this invoice, but guess what?

David lost 12,000 bucks in this fraud. Because they not only grabbed his bank account information. Now he thought the bill was, if I remember correctly about $2,200. They didn't care. They got his bank information. So they immediately went and put $12,000 against it. So what did David do? Again, number one thing he did was he notified his bank's fraud department.

Every financial institution has a fraud department. It is immensely important that you get in contact with them right away. Listen, if you call the 800 number, and they try to put you off, insist on talking to somebody in the fraud department. The regular customer service people may not be the best suited for that.

You want to talk to somebody in the fraud department. The next thing. And I'm going to encourage all of the listeners to do this. Tiffany, you need to do same thing. Number two, document all your communications. I mean, write down every single point of contact. Here's who I spoke to. This is what time it was.

This was a department they're in. This is their name. This is their badge number, whatever those things are, document all of those communications because there are timing issues, especially as it relates to the bank fraud that the bank may be on the hook for some of this and you won't be. The third thing David did was he filed an FBI IC3 complaint, and I'm not going to get into the details of that, but you can look that up online, but he, that's the next thing he did. And the next thing he did was one of those things that I encourage everybody to do. He implemented a new verification process. So he thought about Ralph, I don't ever want to see this happen again. What are some ways that I can have a better verification process for paying bills? And one of the things he did, and I'll share this right now.

We'll talk about this a little bit later is he never goes by that email. He always goes directly to the vendor's website, logs into his account. That way it's secure and he can go look at the invoices that are outstanding. But what was the result of his quick response? The good news is David was able to recover $8,000 of those lost funds.

He still got four grand, which isn't great, but he learned something. He learned to never trust emails, even if they look legitimate and listen. These spoofers, these clowns and criminals, they're rascals and they have figured out ways to spoof emails, they spoof telephone numbers. Look with this AI technology, there's all kinds of things they can do. So if something seems off and David said, Ralph he said, if I thought about it, I would've just contacted the vendor right away. So use that discernment. If something seems off, make sure you double-check on it. So that was David's story. That's the one I called, you know how to small business nightmare.

So let's look at number three. And number three story is what I call the Johnson's family rental scheme. I feel bad because when I talk about families, it seems like I always use the Johnson's name. But again, for the sake of our discussion I never use real names. So let me tell you about this young couple.

Now they were raising three children. They were young kids. So these folks hadn't been on a vacation for years. Husband and wife, the Johnsons' sit down at the kitchen table one morning. He said, you know what? We should really plan a vacation. Let's all, let's go find a rental home and let's go find so they're looking online.

They found one that look great. It was in a perfect location. The price met their budget. And it's funny, I'll say this now, looking back, they said to me, you know, Ralph, it seemed too good to be true at the time. But they're looking at this advertisement and this scammer. And I'll say that now, because obviously, you know, we're talking about scamming. This person claimed to be a missionary. And they had this house, but they were working overseas, and they wanted to rent their home while they were away overseas doing missionary work. So there's that trust factor again.

He said, oh, this person can't be bad. They're a missionary. They're doing God's work across the seas. Then he asked for a $3,000 deposit. And not only did they want that $3,000 deposit, they wanted a wire transfer. Now look, big red flag there. If somebody wants a wire transfer, you better double check. Well the Johnson's hadn't been on that vacation.

They were excited. They love this location. So what they do, they called the bank, and they sent them money. And looking back, they said to me, they said Ralph, something seems off to them. So they're getting their final planning ready. And Mr. Johnson decides to, you know what I'm going to do, he says, I'm going to go do a Google search.

I'm going to look up this address and see what's going on. And all of a sudden, his heart sank. Because he found there were postings online about this very property and how was this speaks scam. And unfortunately, they hadn't used like the Airbnb or the Vrbo, or any kind of online service. They had dealt directly with this person. And they found out the property wasn't actually for rent.

Somebody actually lived there. And the reality was they had been scammed at 3000 bucks. I guess that vacation wasn't going to be a reality for them. But what did they do immediately? The first thing they filed a wire fraud report with their bank. That's important. File that wire fraud report with your bank.

Again, talk to the fraud department, get in touch with those. Second thing they do. They contacted the FBI. They did that because this was across state lines and involved a wire. Now the third thing they did, which I thought was perfect. They alerted their church community. They have like one of these email things that goes out because they're worried about others getting scammed. Apparently, this person had some connection to the church or some tacit connection.

Maybe it was a missionary board that the church worked with other people. So they let the church know, hey, be on the lookout. The fourth thing they did. And we talked about this with our last one with David, they started documenting everything and that's important. Document everything. Get screenshots.

Get all of that into a folder to get ready because you may very well have to do a police report. The FBI might want information. The bank's going to want information. They're probably going to want you to fill out what's called a fraud affidavit. It's not a complicated thing. They just want you to attest that this is what happened. And in this case, unfortunately they lost all 3000 bucks.

The bank couldn't do anything about it because it was a wire. But they learned a very valuable lesson. So let's talk about what these stories tell us. And that's the critical piece of what I'm going to get through. These are the 5 critical steps to take immediately. No matter what kind of online scam you're a victim of these are the 5 things I'm going to recommend you do automatically right away.

Number one thing. Lock down your accounts. Like I said, call your bank immediately to freeze accounts and cancel compromised cards. Time is crucial. Every minute counts. The longer that stuff is out there in the internet and the dark web and all that stuff, the more likely they're going to drain your accounts.

So locked down those accounts right away. Call your bank immediately to freeze accounts. One of the things I'll tell you. A pro tip here is if you've got a checking and a savings account, a lot of times they've only compromised your checking account, and you go right online and transfer all your money over to your checking account. It might not be the best solution, but it's an immediate solution, but first thing you want to do call that bank.

Most of them have 24-hour, seven day a week fraud departments. Second thing. I've talked about this several times now. And if you don't hear anything else I say, if you listen to this, document everything. Save all communications, screenshots, transaction records, emails, whatever those things are, because this documentation is going to be vital for both law enforcement and for your potential recovery down the road. Third thing. Again, we've talked about this a couple of times now as well. Report the crime. File police reports with your local police department. You can do it at the FBI's internet crime complaint center. That's that IC3. I think that's an online thing. Another thing you want to do is file it with the federal trade commission. A lot of times, these online scammers are not local people. They're not the guy that's sitting down the road in their parents' basement with a computer.

Now they might be in somebody's parent's basement. But these are usually big productive things where somebody is in another state. So if you can get the FBI and the federal trade commission, FTC involved, that is a fantastic thing, but it all starts with your local police department. File that police report. Number four, protect your identity.

This is a proactive thing. But if you're the victim of a scam, the first thing you want to do after you do that a couple of things we talked about is contact all three major credit bureaus to place a fraud alert on your credit reports. You might also consider what's called a credit freeze for additional protection.

Talked about that in other shows, but if you're the victim of an online scam, contact them right away, go right to the websites for each of those, make sure you're going to their legitimate websites, put that fraud alert on there. They have people that you can talk to that'll explain to you how to do that.

And maybe you want to put that credit freeze on, even if it's for a little bit of time so that if anybody tries to go apply for an account, they're going to have to contact you directly. Number five. And this is the growing piece. This is the, what did I learn from this? This is the time to strengthen your security. Like Martha did, change all those passwords, enable that two factor authentication and review every one of your account settings. Listen. These people that do online commerce have gotten really good at protecting you from fraud. They've got things set up, but you don't know how many people I run into daily who don't have complicated passwords.

You know, you think I'm joking, but I've got clients that are coming in and they'll say, hey, let's log into your bank account. I want to see your transactions, such and such. What is your password? Oh, Ralph, it's simple. It's password 1, 2, 3, 4. And I look at them like, are you crazy? Like, seriously, that's your passcode? All right.

So I put it in and I said, okay, well it'll probably send you a text. No, no, no, no. I didn't turn on that two factor authentication stuff. Ralph, I don't want to be bothered with that. So you got to review those account settings. Now, I'll be honest with you. What I have found is most of the online sites are requiring it now because they don't want to be liable for that stuff.

So even if you don't want to be bothered with it, most of the time they're going to turn it on anyway. But here's my big takeaway. Remember this. Being scammed doesn't define your financial journey. Just as we learn to manage our discretionary spending wisely, we must also learn to protect ourselves from fraud.

That's the key. So you've got to use this experience to build stronger financial defenses while maintaining our faith in God's provision. You can balance the two things. You can have a strong financial defense and still have faith that God's going to take care of you. Now I'm going to share some preventative measures in just a few minutes, but first I want to ask you a few questions because I'm really trying to grow the show and reach more people. So here's one of the things I want to ask you to do.

If you can do this for me today, I would greatly appreciate. I want you to share the show with others who can benefit from the information I'm presenting today. Now today's show might be a great one to send out. Send it to all your friends and family. All you got to do is send them an email with a link to askralph.com and tell them how this show has impacted your financials and your faith life. Because the truth is word of mouth is the key and you're sharing with friends and family will help us grow the show and reach more people. Hopefully we can help people with a positive message, not just about being scammed, but you know, if you're a loyal listener to this show, every day, I try to figure out ways to help people improve their finances and grow in their faith. So I would highly encourage you to do that.

Just send a simple email, say, listen, I've been listening to this guy Ralph, he's a little annoying. I'm just kidding. He's a good guy. He talks about stuff that matters. I would love it if you would check out his podcast. So just send them to askralph.com and I would greatly appreciate it. Now I promise you some preventive measures, so here's what I'm going to do because the truth is prevention is always better than recovery. I would much rather prevent it than to recover it. Now listen, I'm a type two diabetic. I'm going to share something with you. When I was younger and looking back at it now I'm 52, it would have been great to prevent what I'm dealing with now. Now I'm recovering from it.

There's things I can do to improve it, but prevention is always better than recovery. So the same thing goes along with these online scams. And I start by meditating on Proverbs. Think about Proverbs. It reminds us to be wise as serpents. You might think, wow, the serpent, that's kind of a negative connotation. But no. God saying to us be wise as serpents, but then the next part of that be as gentle as doves. And I think that perfectly applies to our online activity.

So here's the practical steps you can take. Number one. Never never, never, I said it three times, never fourth time, never wire money to someone you haven't met in person, period. Don't ever do it. If you don't know this person, now it's different if you're working with a law firm, maybe you're buying a house, something along those lines, but generally never wire money to someone you haven't met in person.

Number two. Verify all financial requests through a second channel. So just like that guy, David. He got that email with that invoice. He could have easily resolved the issue by logging in to the vendor's site, going into his account and seeing is that a legitimate invoice. So you want to always verify those financial requests through a second channel. Number three. And this is the single mom thing,

Tiffany, I hate to say this and I'm not being critical and I'm not being judgmental, but you got to be cautious of deals that seem too good to be true. When that Christian investment fellow started talking to you about these fantastic returns, your antenna should have went up. There's no such thing as get rich quick overnight. He promised you a return.

It just doesn't make sense financially. And like I said, I'm not judging you. I get it. You're a single mom. You're trying to do the best for your family. But in general, you got to be cautious of deals that seem too good to be true cause usually they are. Another thing I'm going to encourage you to do Martha, you could do this right away is install reputable security software. A lot of these things, people are understanding these software developers, they have ways to prevent this. So install that. And number five, never share passwords or verification code. That's just the bottom line. And unfortunately, I didn't tell you about this in the story with Martha.

When she had that fake Microsoft tech support guy, she actually had multi-factor set up on her bank. And while he was going through the remote thing, he actually said to her, listen, it's going to send you a code right now. He didn't tell it was for a bank. You're going to get a code. I need to know what that code is.

He unlocked her bank account right there, because on her particular computer, she had her password automatically saved. So as soon as she hit that online banking website, she had that multifactor set up. But the guy asked her, he said, Martha, I just sent you a code. He gave me the code and they were done. I know this is a tough one today.

Now tomorrow, we're going to shift gears and discuss seven proven strategies to get the highest price when selling your car. A lot of people are in the market to buy a new car, and they've got this other car they need to sell. So you don't want to miss these insider tips that could help put you thousands more in your pocket. And listen. I want to remind you. Money is simply a tool. That's all it is.

We can use it the right way or the wrong way. It's up to us to decide how we're going to use it and how we write our own money stories. That is just the truth. We can write our own money stories. Remember, my passion is to help you achieve financial success. I want to see you live out your dreams. I want to see you grow in your faith. And I know together we can master your finances from a Christian perspective. So as I always end the show, I want to encourage you to stay financially savvy out there, be aware of those investors, be wise as a serpent but gentle as a dove and may God bless you abundantly.

Narrator
00:24:49

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