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Southampton Town Police Chief James Kiernan. FILE PHOTO
A fool and his money may soon be parted — but it doesn’t take a fool to get scammed.
Every week, the local police blotters on the South Fork are rife with reports of scammers who prey on people from all walks of life, all demographic backgrounds, and all income brackets.
Some of the scams appeal to heartstrings, others appeal to vanity, others appeal to fear, but the through line is clear: scammers are after your money and they’re very good at their job.
“If you’re a human being, you’re susceptible,” said Southampton Town Police Chief James Kiernan during a recent discussion with Express News Group editors and writers on the subject of scams. The conversation will be the subject of an upcoming 27Speaks podcast.
“It’s a myth,” he added, to believe that a scam victim needs be “an old person or a stupid person or a gullible person,” though they are a frequently targeted group.
A prevalent scam in Southampton, Kiernan said, is the one where a grandparent or elder is contacted by a scammer posing as a law enforcement officer and told that their relative is in jail or in some other kind of trouble. The victim is then instructed to send money in order to, say, bail out their relative.
He recalled an incident where a woman whom Kiernan knows personally called him hysterically crying and told him that her son had been arrested on his way to work after getting into a drunk-driving accident where he hit a woman who was pregnant. The woman was going to lose the baby — and the son was in big, big trouble.
Kiernan said he didn’t immediately conclude that this was a scam. Rather, his instinct was to call his peers in the Suffolk County Police Department to see if they had this person in custody.
But then he realized that none of what the woman was saying “made any sense.”
Kiernan then asked the woman if she had tried to reach out directly to her son. She had not — and when she called his cellphone, he was at work.
The lesson is, Kiernan said, that if someone gets a call like this, they should immediately reach out to the person targeted in the scam to see if they’re actually in any kind of distress or trouble.
The other takeaway from this popular scam is that no person from any police agency would ever make such a call in the first place.
Kiernan visits local senior centers to get the word out about scams and noted that in some cases, an elder will be tipped off if the scammer uses language unfamiliar to them to describe them, for example by calling the person “Nana.”
“Some figure it out, others don’t,” he said.
The chief noted that his agency is predicting an uptick in scamming with the upcoming summer Olympics in Paris.
He expects to see scams where, for example, a person goes to Paris to enjoy the event, but has their phone or computer hacked with the scammer taking over the person’s contact list.
Then they’ll send an email to everyone on that list to the effect of, “Hey, it’s Joe — I lost my wallet in Paris,” said Kiernan, with a request that everyone Venmo the fake victim money. “That’s one to look out for,” he said. “It’s coming.”
The advent of artificial intelligence technology is adding another frightful dimension to the issue as the scams are being more sophisticated and difficult to upend.
For example, Kiernan said that somebody will call a person up and record their voice, and then deploy the AI to say something else. The scammer will go on a phishing expedition to attain banking information and then go into the victim’s accounts and steal their money.
Threats are a common tactic used by scammers to achieve their nefarious ends.
A February 27 report of identity theft came into the Southampton Town Police Department that involved a woman who had gotten a call from someone identifying himself as an employee of Chase Bank. The man said her credit cards and Amazon account had been compromised and needed to be closed. The woman immediately realized it was a scam and said as much to the fake Chase employee, who then threatened her daughter.
The woman called the police and confirmed with Chase that none of what the man said was true.
Some of the scams are so sophisticated that it really is difficult to figure it out until after the fact.
Case in point: An East Hampton woman told police last week that she had been caught up in an elaborate financial scam earlier this year in which she had received an email from the “office of job placement” at the Fashion Institute of Technology, where she is a student. She was instructed to email a professor if she was interested in a job offer they had, and she was. She sent her resume and then had an online interview with the (fake) professor.
Then she received a check for $2,250 that had the FIT logo on it and was instructed to deposit the check into her bank account to pay for school supplies, and then send the money back to the school via Zelle. When the check then bounced, she realized she had been victimized. She told East Hampton Town Police that Zelle had basically said tough luck given that she had agreed to their terms and conditions, so she had no way to recover the $2,250.
Another common scam is for someone to falsely list a home for rent on a short-term rental platform and then steal the victim’s money when they book the rental. Occasionally, a person or persons will arrive at the rental that they think they’ve paid for, only to realize they can’t access the dwelling that they’ve paid for and figure out a way to break in to the home. That doesn’t happen too often, but it does happen.
“Most of the time, it doesn’t go the full boat,” said Kiernan. “Mostly people answer the door and say they didn’t rent the house, sorry. But it happens here all the time.”
The art of the successful scam requires a certain nimbleness in the face of public awareness of certain scams, such as a popular one where a person is told they’ve won a big sweepstakes prize and all they have to do is pay the tax on it in order to get the big check.
The lesson there is that if someone asks for money to be paid in order to get more money or a prize, it’s a scam.
The sweepstakes scam has been upgraded, said Kiernan. Now what they’ll do is use the sweepstakes-scam motif to launch a phishing scam where they tell the victim that they don’t have to send any money, they just have to provide their Social Security number so the scammers can notify the IRS on their behalf. Then they’ll use that information to steal the person’s identity, open a credit card in their name or otherwise figure out a way to steal their money.
There are also old-fashioned check-washing scams going on in Southampton that have been given an upgrade in the AI era. That scam historically meant a person’s mail would be stolen and any checks that might be in the mail along with it.
The scammers would then literally “wash” the check — take out the dollar amount and replace it with another one and alter the payee information.
Southampton Village Police reported a late February check scam where a check for $143.39 had been stolen from a business mailbox and the amount was changed to $2,900 with the payee information also altered.
That scam has taken a leap forward using AI software where a scammer will simply take a picture of the check and replace that information electronically, along with an AI generated signature of the victim.
Scams that prey on vanity or sexuality have also taken place here, said Kiernan. The typical one involves teenage boys who are visiting a pornography site or chat room and are encouraged to send along a picture of their genitals to the scammers. The victim is then extorted into sending gift cards to the scammer at risk of having their private parts sent to their entire contact list.
Kids have committed suicide over this scam, Kiernan said, and “kids in Southampton have been a victim of this.”
Detectives who work these cases will tell the teen victim that sure, they made a mistake and it’s quite embarrassing, but it’s not the end of their life. He implored parents to mention this scam to their teen children. “This is happening and they need to be aware,” he said.
