“It’s devastation. I think about it every day,” Charlotte Cowles tells Inside Edition after handing over $50,000 to people who said she was being targeted in a scam.
The warning is often issued far and wide: beware of scammers trying to get your personal information over the phone. Still, one in 10 Americans still lose money to phone scams every year. And even a financial writer found herself at the heart of a scam that she says cost her tens of thousands of dollars.
“It’s devastation. I think about it every day,” Charlotte Cowles tells Inside Edition.
Cowles has made a career out of writing about money. Her work as been published in The New York Times and she is a financial advice columnist for New York Magazine’s “The Cut.”
But recently, she was scammed out of $50,000.
The con began with a phone call from someone claiming to be from Amazon who had questions about large purchases she hadn’t made. Additional callers, including one claiming to be from the CIA, claimed she was being targeted by scammers and that the only way to protect her money was to immediately withdraw it. They knew personal information about her family, including the name of her young son, and they told her to not tell anyone what was happening.
“They told me my home was being watched and my computer had been hacked my phones were being tapped ... They really made me feel in credibly unsafe and very worried for my family,” she tells Inside Edition.
Cowles withdrew $50,000 of her savings to hand over to the individuals she thought were government investigators for safe keeping, which she now says she realizes sounds crazy, but that fear for her family made her act.
“He told me my name was linked to international crimes including drug-smuggling and wiring millions of dollars overseas,” she says. “He knew where my family members lived and that really made me listen.”
While Cowles was humiliated, she decided to share her story by writing about it. She’s found that she’s far from alone. Last year, 600,000 people were scammed out of an estimated $2 billion.
Cowles also said she no longer answers her phone.
According to the Federal Trade Commission, consumers lost $10 billion to scammers last year. That’s up from 14% from the year before.
