Scams in the United States: Scammers target Latinos and leave a $10 billion hole in the United States

The first email made him very excited. “A 1.22 x 1.22 painting is not sold every day,” explains María Paula Rennis. This Argentine artist received a purchase offer for one of her greatest artists through her website. The interested party was a woman from Nashville (Tennessee) who wanted to give it to her wife for her wedding anniversary. They communicated via text messages although Rennis, from New York, had the idea of ​​doing a video conference so that she could better appreciate the colors of the work. When it came time to talk about payment, she offered to collect through Venmo or Zelle, but the buyer asked to pay by check to prevent her wife, who managed the couple’s accounts, from seeing the charge for the surprise gift of she.

This was just one of the many pieces that were difficult to fit into what ended up being the plot of a well-known scam, that of the check, which according to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is not only frequent but has also been going on for four years. It meant average losses for the victims of about $2,000.

The buyer of the painting told Rennis that a moving company would come for it to take it to the Philippines with the rest of the couple’s things because they were going to move there. And she sent him payment. The cashier’s check turned out to be from a California entity and arrived via courier from Arkansas. The amount? Double the value of the painting.

That geographical puzzle and the amount of money set off Rennis’s alarms, and before speaking with the carrier, despite the urgency expressed by the buyer, he decided to call the bank. “As soon as I gave the check number they told me that it was fake and that I was not the first to have a case like this,” he says. The artist could have lost the painting, its value and the excess money that was supposed to be used to pay for the transportation.

This is a classic scam variant. Consumers receive a legitimate-looking check for a larger than expected amount to pay a third party before this payment method has been approved (clearing) by the entity in which it is deposited. Although the amount is reflected in the check balance, it takes a couple of days to process. When the bank verifies that it is false, the victim has already advanced the payment to that third party.

FTC data shows that 2.6 million frauds were reported last year. The majority remained tentative like Rennis’s, but 27% of them were completed. That is, approximately one in five attempts works. It is a problem that resulted in losses of 10.3 billion dollars in 2023, 14% more than the previous year.

Email is already the favorite medium to set a bait. Until 2022, contacts were initiated through text messages and phone calls. According to Truecaller, the call identification and blocking application, Hispanics in the United States are twice as vulnerable as the rest of the population to losing money through telephone scams. They also receive twice as many insistent calls from people claiming to be calling on behalf of a government authority or a service company.

It’s something ES, a Dominican living in the Bronx, knows a lot about. Her 73-year-old father, retired, sick with diabetes and in need of dialysis, has to manage calls daily with doctor appointments and assistance, but one day he said that someone from the Social Security Administration was calling him. He didn’t understand: “They don’t give me anyone who speaks Spanish.”

One day they called her on a Sunday while ES was visiting him and she answered to simply verify what she suspected, that they knew a lot of information about her father. The identity theft needed just a few more pieces of information to complete.

“I told my father never to answer, that neither Social Security nor any agency is going to call him on the phone. Never. And even less on a Sunday and if they wanted to talk to him they would do it in Spanish,” she says frustrated. She explains that she manages her father’s email and for a year the blocking of the phone that she put on the Donotcall list worked.

“But then they called again, scammers are always there for people who don’t know the language, don’t understand how things work or don’t know their rights,” laments this woman, who works in a school and says she works to avoid “ that people fall for it.”

A report requested by HACER and Better Bureau Business in 2022 on the Hispanic population in two states, Minnesota and North Dakota, revealed that language problems, not being prepared in fraud prevention, being undocumented in the country, being trusting by nature and “the need for Latinos to provide,” makes Latinos more vulnerable, especially those who are older or those who have been in the country for less than five years.

ES has been in the United States since he was 15 and says he knows what he has to do because he also confesses that 11 years ago he was on the verge of falling into the trap of fraud. It was due to a fraudulent email from PayPal in which they asked him to change the account password. “They didn’t take a cent from me because the page was frozen, but I had to report, including cards, and I monitored my credit report for a year,” she explains.