One day at work, I got a call from a number that I have never seen before. I hung up the first time, but I got a call back immediately, so I ended up picking it up. Once I got on the phone, the scammer posed as a police officer from the Philadelphia police department and claimed that my identity has been stolen and has been mixed up with drug trafficking, money laundering, etc. I immediately thought this was a scam, and asked him how do I know he was legitimate, and he told me to look up the number that he had called from and gave me his badge number. Now looking back I realized that he had spoofed the number and if I had tried to hang up and call back, I would have known that it was a scam, but I only did a quick lookup on the phone number and thought that this was a legitimate call and I actually was in legal trouble.
The fake police officer then transferred me over to a fake federal agent who said that the attorney general is going to put a freeze on my account and I need to transfer the money to one of the active agents working on the case. He said this case was confidential and I need to not tell anyone, so throughout the day I kept quiet to myself as I just ignored the sea of reg flags. I googled every piece of information he gave me and even tried to justify why I couldn’t find some of this information. To this day, I still don’t know why I did what I did, but I ended up transferring $27,500 to these fake agents. During these conversations he even stayed on the line with me the whole time for over 8 hours in total. Now that I think about it, he was using this to stop me from validating, so if I had just hung up or talked to someone, I would have known.
I am still deeply suffering from the consequences and I kick myself everyday. I don’t think I am a foolish person, but at that moment, I definitely wasn’t in the right state of mind, and I wished that I could have kept a clear head.
I hope that sharing my experience here can start the healing process so that I can eventually forgive myself.