Scammer Picks Wrong Sympathy Handicap
Any good grifter knows that a classic shortcut to sympathy is to fake a handicap. This guy, however, should have thought about the distancing effect of using a telephone relay service, which is designed for people who are hearing impaired.
DeVoss Auto Repair in Richmond says they were contacted twice this month by the scam artist,s but didn't fall prey to their tricks.
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Here's how it works: the hearing impaired customer types in their question and they dial into the relay operator who then contacts the business and acts as an intermediary.
In this scam, using a phone relay system, the scam artist called DeVoss Auto stating that he wanted to buy a used car in Florida and he wanted it delivered to Richmond to make any necessary repairs.
But the caller said the person delivering the car would not accept credit cards and asked DeVoss to write a check and mail it to the tow service, money that the caller said he would reimburse DeVoss with his own credit card.
With a transparently ridiculous advance check fraud angle like that, we can understand why the scammer would want to find something to make his case more appealing. We'll never understand why he though going through an anonymous third party via the telephone was a good idea, though.
Update: It turns out, this is not as wacky or uncommon as I thought. Our own Laura Northrup posted a very informative piece related to Nigeria-based telephone relay service scams earlier this summer: "Wells Fargo Keeps Hanging Up On Your Deaf Grandmother"
"Better Business Bureau Warns of Scam Artists Posing as Deaf People" [WTVR via BBB]
(Photo: Sam Ruaat)
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Hey, a commenter here posted about something like this just a day or so ago. Consumerist has its finger on the pulse of the scam nation!
I used to work at a financial institution and I would get relay calls from scammers about once a month. Once the scammers realized that they have to jump through all of the necessary hoops before we would divulge any info they would hang up and the poor operator gets to apologize for the inconvenience.
I guess relay calls are good way to put some time in between responses so they don't stumble over themselves too much on the phone.
I work in an auto body shop near Seattle and have received calls very similar to this roughly once a month since April. The first time I took the call it reeked of a scam, but I was able to get an email address out of the person and predictably received no response. I've gotten the same call another 4 times. Always some variation of "relative in an accident traveling to state X and I'll have it towed to your shop and pay up front for the work after your check clears for the towing." interesting to know that it's happening all around the country, and not just local to Seattle.
We used to get those calls at least once a week at my old job. People would want to order 5 computers or something ridiculous and have it shipped across the country. Once I tried explaining it to the operator that it was a method to try and scam us. He kept reassuring me that he was providing a service for the handicapped, of which I explained that I understood his service, but rather the people using it were trying to scam us.
Our method to try and reduce this was to accept no checks, and the customer had to appear in person to either purchase the machine (and then having it shipped only in the same state), or order over the phone and be picked up at our store. We were a small local store and only a handful of times did we make minor exceptions. All of our products could have been bought online anyway (but we were a service and support center mainly).
I think this method makes it that much easier for people to anonymously pay with stolen credit cards. Making it mandatory for them to show up and provide ID somewhere in the transaction made all of our would be scanners hang up.
@madog: *All of our products would have been available online at any number of other stores. We didn't have a web store.
So is the scammer in cahoots with the towing company? I don't see a hugely profitable angle here.
@Chris Walters: Found it! It is, of course, a little different than I recalled: [consumerist.com]
It's by comptalking, and it's at 4:55 p.m. But it is a supposedly deaf guy trying to get the recipient to cash a check over the amount.
@madog: The operators by law have to say whatever the person types. Certain sites advocate using the service to call a friend and then type in nasty and/or smutty things, which the operator then has to repeat.
I had one of these calls a few years ago, and spoke to a friend of mine at the local ATT office about it. By federal mandate/law/rule, the teletext people who receive these calls on the TTY device must go verbatim on what is said, and are not allowed to deviate except to clarify, spell or otherwise 'correct' the content of the messages being relayed.
On top of that, they have to maintain confidentiality on any calls that they relay.
Assuming it is the legitimate relay operator, they only say what is presented. Even if you know it is a scam, they can't do or say anything other than what is typed out to them, or what you state in response; even if, as in my incident, they know that the person on the other end is committing a criminal act, they technically can't even report it.
I'm hoping that their rules have changed somewhat in the past few years, but I somehow doubt it...
@Aladdyn:
yep!
The Internet Service Relay Operators CANNOT make judgement calls. They are not allowed to.
They work like proxy basically shielding the caller's actual identity and any bad or fractured english speaking skills they may possess. (like if they are calling from NIGERIA)
Also- the phone calls are FREE!
@Chris Walters: This relay scam has been used/abused for some time now. It really exploded when they made the service available via a web interface. Prior to that you needed a TTY type thingie for the deaf, not so easy to obtain or use for scamming.
I worked in a call center once upon a time and we got these calls frquently. This was 5 years ago so it's not surprising to see this. Around this time I also found out that the relay service relays everything that is said to you but also relays everything that you say AND everything in the background to the caller. Someone was laughing in the background and the relay operator told the caller this and the caller assumed we were laughing at him for being handicapped.
@Aladdyn: That's correct. Once it becomes apparent that it's a prank call (or whatever), they do transfer you to a supervisor. Ask me how I know that.
I used to work as a fraud investigator, and we'd always get calls through relay services. We once had a situation where the relay operator actually did tell us she thought this guy was a fraud (we were surprised, as we know they aren't allowed to say that either) but this operator had been dealing with the guy all day.
He ordered stuff from us, stealing a company's business credit to do so (companies can be victims of ID Theft also when someone tries to hijack your line of business credit) and had stuff shipped to the victim company, intending to re-route it after it shipped. However, he contacted the shipping company too late, and the stuff was delivered to the victim.
So on one line, we have the receptionist at the legit business, wondering why they received all this stuff they never ordered, and on the other we have the fraudster, through a relay line, trying to get us to have the stuff sent to him. (and he'd keep calling back until most of us on the floor had talked to him)
At one point, he called the victim business and tried to convince the receptionist there turn the shipment over to the shipping company when they arrived. He was actually cursing at her through the relay service even! We had to send a separate shipping co., with specific code word/instructions to give to her so she would know which shipping company to give the stuff to in order to return it. It was crazy. Relay calls are a huge red flag for fraud.
@Chris Walters: It's especially popular because people can use it from overseas; 419 fraudsters are fond of cold-calling old people with it. Relay operators are legally obligated not to warn people about the fraud but instead to be an impartial third party, which makes being a relay operator one of the most frustrating positions ever.
One of the funniest Howard Stern moments ever was when John the Stutterer received a relay service call from his "lover" using the AT&T relay service. Check out Youtube and search for G2NcnPwVMgY
My mother works for AT&T doing relay, and it's sad the amount of scammers that use the relay system and internet relay to pull this off. And people do fall for it. By law, the relay workers are not allowed to say anything other than what is typed or they can be fired, but I guess sometimes they "can not read" what the scammer is typing, or sometimes the scammer just somehow "becomes disconected."
I used to be a relay operator that did local and IP relay calls. Local calls were all legit, they came from actual hearing/speaking impaired people using TTYs or Sidekicks. IP relay is where the headaches came from. Any jerk with an internet connection could use IP relay. So I knew that as soon as 3 o'clock rolled around, I'd get an influx of kids prank calling their friends or themselves, just so they could hear someone say a dirty word. I had to deal with so many fraud calls. I felt really bad for deaf people who were legitimately trying to contact businesses because a lot of the time, the business would refuse the call, having been scammed/almost scammed before. Like it's been said before, relay operators are not allowed to stray from what is being sent by the relay customer. Our calls were randomly monitored and we could have been fired for that. Craigslist was a favorite target for scammers, particularly people selling cars or dogs. Scammers love puppy posts! Here's a tip to anyone adopting out puppies on CL: if you get a relay call where the first question from the "deaf person" is "do you still have puppy for sale?" hang up.
that actually happened to me today, but my boss knew what was going on before me and had me hang up before anything was discussed with the scammer.
Apparently that poor operator is at the mercy of the conversation. they have to relay ALL messages. Even phone sex. Degrading. Theyre also forbidden from commentary, ie. they cant tell you "Its a scam".
@Overheal: I never had to do legit phone sex on relay, but apparently lots of kids get their kicks out of hearing a stranger say c*ck, sh*t, f*ck, and n*gger.
@Easton21: There is an angle. If you do this 4 or 5 times a day you could rack up some serios cash for like 3 hours of work. Not that I condone this but there is a market.
@Aladdyn: I used to be a relay operator. There was one person who used to call himself on relay, then copy and paste the Microsoft EULA for Windows XP into the text window, over and over until the operator got hoarse. One of these calls went on for 4-5 hours.
@alexcassidy: They're not supposed to do that. The only reason they can interfere with the call is if someone on the line is harassing them, the operator, excessively.
On my first day of work, someone started in on me: "Hey, operator, you sound fat. Are you fat?" I panicked and got a supervisor, but if it hadn't been my first day I wouldn't have been allowed to do that.
@KimmyAnne_678: I used to do obvious fraud calls in a monotone. People would assume I was a particularly bad telemarketer and hang up.
@Laura Northrup: Now I'm curious. What protocol are you supposed to follow in such a situation? If it's explicitly to you, are you absolved from relaying, or do you have to repeat "you sound fat. Are you fat?" to the person on the other end?
How weird, anyway.
@HPCommando:
My friend recently had this scam tried on him with a car he sold on eBay. The teletext operator DID tell him he was being scammed and advised him not to continue the conversation. I don't know the law, but that is what happened to him.
@100-mortgage.com: I think we need to teach a lesson to people who run shady scam AdSense spam sites then spam them on Consumerist as well.
It has been years since my business has received any relay calls.
Most of the calls we did receive were "legit" but rather abusive towards our entry level staff who generally answer all incoming telephone calls. The callers always wanted minute details of product information and descriptions. Information that is not usually relevant to normal purchases and would be impossible to answer without the actual product placed before the staff member assigned to take telephone orders.
(How thick is the rubber material attached to the handle, does the rubber material mount with 3 screws or 4 screws and are screw heads color coded to match the case? .... by the way, the product is a chain saw)
When the staff member tried to pass the call to a senior staff member or somebody on the actual sales floor, the callers would hold claim such actions were violations of the ADA act.
After a wave of rather abusive calles we stopped accepting the relay calls. Bad? No, because today there is this called the interweb. It is a lot faster for communicating minute details and fostering transactions between handicaped and nonhandicap.
We still get handicapped instore. But they can look for themselves at the chainsaws and decide if the lack of color coded screw heads makes the chainsaw more difficult to operate.
@Chris Walters:
With the unfortunate consequence that actual Deaf people get fucked over because a lot of places just refuse all TTY calls now.
Oh, and the claims the relay calls are free are completely bogus.
We knew one of our callers had been initiated from a military installation because the caller had identified him/her-self as a military dependant. The caller wanted to know if pressure washer we sold (for well over $1k) was identical to the one from another brand (which we don't sell) that he/she could rent from the BX for pennies per day.
Our staff member replied, "for what you are going to do with the pressure washer it would be best if you rented the unit from the BX". That got one of those "anti-handicap squeals" that seemed to be all too common.
About 90 days later we receive a telephone call from the GAO demanding reinbursment for the cost of the relay call placed from the military installation. Yes, the relay service was charging Uncle Sam, and in turn he was charging us. We didn't have any financial gain from the call, but we were legally obligated to pay for the call.
At that point we did a more thorough investigation of our own telephone bills and found that we had indeed paid for every relay call ever placed to our business. Just a few pennies or bucks here and there, but we paid for the privilage of those calls. The fees were never for the actual call per se, it was always an administrative or access fee.
Screw that. Damn right we stopped accepting the calls.
@floraposte: No, they were asking me the question. The protocol basically is to act like a robot and tell them, repeatedly, to address their conversation to the other person. This doesn't always work, and we got a lot of abuse.
I would often type out particularly obnoxious things that the hearing party said to me or to someone in the background, especially if it was obvious that the person was lying. So you'd get something like:
Can you pick up the kids from soccer Tuesday night? I have to work a late shift. (To person in bkgd: Yeah I told her I have to work, so it's cool, we can still use the Mets tickets.)
People are stupid.
When I was an AT&T CSR I had someone call me thru a relay service asking to buy 500 iphones. Um. No.
Also, it was used quite often to prank call another business I worked for as a telephone operator. Always fun when you'd get the operator who wouldn't listen to anything directed at them.
People have used this tactic to call 911 anonymously as well to send SWAT teams into unsuspecting innocent people's houses and place of business. TTY is such an ancient technology, I'm surprised it's even used any more, deaf people can buy cellphones and text their family members and others, I see no need for such an obsolete form of communication to even exist, all it is used for now a days is to anonymous dirt.
I had a friend who used to get relay calls occasionally at her job as a phone sex operator.
I hear there's this large ditch in arizona in which you can throw naughty people and you'll never hear or see them again.
Yea, this scam is not at all uncommon.
When I worked for Sears we had a group using this to call every sears in the area to make large purchases (but not too large) using a "sears card" that was actually a stolen cc number (usually a visa or mc # actually)
Fortunately after getting past a couple associates in some stores that didn't know any better one of my guys caught the fact that the "sears card" number didn't start with the correct digit.
For a while we just started refusing the orders through that system, but they were persistent and still scammed another store in the area after they had all been warned about it.
Even LP had been blowing it off. I was actually able to use a lot of the information they had used to place orders and cross reference a few consistent things and found a cel phone that I traced back to a home address. After I did all the work on it, then corp. got interested and it turned into a big federal sting because of the credit card fraud and various cities involved. I also had to call track down the specific bank (harder than I expected--though I would just have to call visa) and report the stolen card numbers because of our slack LP.
But yea, it was a pretty big thing going on in our area for a while.
I got what I assume was a legit call years ago when I was a teen working at a pizza joint. The caller placed their order, I gave them their total, and they went batshit crazy. I have no idea what they were saying, because the relay operator just said "hmm... well, now she's just swearing and cursing at both of us..."
This is why Many businesses have a dedicated TTY line and number. Legitimate calls from the hearing/speech impaired will come through via the TTY since obviously an actual disabled person would have their own TTY.
However I did have a deaf customer once who had a video phone service so he could sign to others fluent in ASL. It displayed the other party through the TV set. It was a really neat setup. The customer was also pleased that I was willing to correspond with him via text message.
That'll teach him!