It was a perfectly normal day. I was going through my email just to clean out any messages I didn’t need. I decided to also check my junk folder, which I rarely do. As I was scrolling through I saw an email from Paypal.
I haven’t used Paypal in years so I was curious what this email could be about. I clicked on it just to check it out. When I read the email I was completely shocked. The email said that I had bought an illegal gun for like 300 dollars. I was extremely confused and scared because I have never even thought about buying a gun in my life.
In the email it said I had 24 hours to call a certain number and cancel the order. I panicked so I immediately called it. A man answered. He had an accent. Still completely stressed out, I told him the whole story. The first thing he asked me was my age. I told him I was 19. He immediately hung up.
This really confused me. But I was still worried about this gun so I called back. The same man answered. I retold the whole situation.
He then said, “You’re very young right? Like 19 or 20”
I answered, “Yes.”
He said, “Can you put your parents on the phone?”
I said, “My parents aren’t here, I’m at college.”
He then said, “Okay I’ll help you.”
I don’t know why he cared so much about my age. Maybe he felt bad trying to scam someone so young. But once he found out my parents weren’t with me he lost that sympathy and continued the scam with me.
He told me his name and told me he was some worker at Paypal. He then proceeded to tell me to download this app so he could see my screen and tell me what to do. Without thinking I did it. He told me to open a bunch of random things such as the email from Paypal as well as my bank account and settings.
He told me that someone had stolen all my information and that he and his team at Paypal could help me figure it out. He said I would need to call another number which was apparently the security at Paypal. He gave me the new number so I called it.
I was transferred to another man with the same accent. Honestly they sounded almost identical! This guy collected some basic information such as my name, phone, number, and email. Luckily he didn’t request anything crazy like any bank numbers or social security number. But he could still see my screen. He then told me he would have to transfer me to someone else who was apparently a police officer.
So he gave me the next number. This time I was transferred to a woman, still with the same accent. I started to become a little bit suspicious of how they all sounded so similar like they were all friends. But I continued talking to her. She reinforced the fact that someone had stolen all my information and knew everything about me and could basically scam me and hack me forever unless I worked with them.
She then started requesting similar information as the last guy. As I was telling her I just started to get a weird feeling. I had my laptop with me so I looked up why I received an email from Paypal about an illegal gun. The internet immediately told me that this was a common scam and was completely fake and not from Paypal. I have never felt stupider. I realized I could have avoided all of this if I had looked this up from the beginning.
The internet told me that if I had already fallen for this scam to go to the police immediately. I still had this random scammer lady on the phone. I told her I had to go because I had class. She started arguing with me saying that I had to stay on the phone to figure this out. I lied and said I’d call her back later just to get out of it and then I quickly hung up.
I ran to the police station right near my college. I rang the doorbell and an officer let me in. They asked me what was wrong and I quickly explained the situation. They had me sit in a waiting room and wait for officers to deal with my case. After a few minutes two officers had me come into their office.
They had me tell them everything. I told them about the email, and the call, what information I had given them, and the app that could show them my screen. The people on the calls had given me their names and numbers so I gave those to the police as well. The police wrote all of this down and then asked me to show them the email. Then they asked me to show them the screen recording app. I looked up the app in my app store and showed it to the officers. They scrolled down to the bottom and looked at the reviews. The comments all said that the app was a scam used by scammers. I felt really stupid again.
After recording all the information and having me send a screenshot of the email they filed a report. They also told me to call my bank which I did when I got back to my apartment. Luckily everything worked out. The scammers were stopped and nothing was stolen from my bank account. And I guess now I can say I filed my first police report!