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Maintaining anonymity, it turns out, is key to scam-busting and scamming alike. He began talking to me over Skype in the fall of 2019 - and then sharing recordings like the episode with Langer - on the condition that I not reveal his identity, which he said was necessary to protect himself against the ire of the bad guys and to continue what he characterizes as his activism.

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“I like to know how they work.” A software engineer based in the United Kingdom, he runs a YouTube channel under the pseudonym Jim Browning, where he regularly posts videos about his fraud-fighting efforts, identifying call centers and those involved in the crimes. The person who rescued Langer that afternoon delights in getting these calls, however. Last year, the app Truecaller commissioned the Harris Poll to survey roughly 2,000 American adults and found that 22 percent of the respondents said they had lost money to a phone scam in the past 12 months Truecaller projects that as many as 56 million Americans may have been victimized this way, losing nearly $20 billion. According to the F.B.I.’s Internet Crime Complaint Center, the total losses reported to it by scam victims increased to $3.5 billion in 2019 from $1.4 billion in 2017. “OK! It came back on!” she said, relieved.įor most people, calls like the one Langer received are a source of annoyance or anxiety. She told him she wouldn’t answer the phone if he contacted her again. By now, Langer was beginning to have doubts about the caller. He advised her to go back the next morning.

But later that afternoon, she rang the number the caller had given her and told him she had been unable to get to the bank in time. Langer couldn’t recall, when we spoke, if she drove to the bank or not. She was to say that she needed to log in to check her statements and pay bills. “Don’t tell them anything about the refund,” he said. On her computer screen, the caller typed out what he wanted her to say at the bank. “He was very insistent,” Langer told me recently. The caller noted that the bank didn’t close until 4:30, which meant she still had 45 minutes. Because it was late afternoon, however, she wasn’t sure if it would be open when she got there. “How far is the bank from your house?” he asked.Ī few blocks away, Langer answered. The caller asked Langer if she could go to her bank to resolve the issue. “Thank you!” she replied.Īfter submitting the form, he tried to log into Langer’s account but failed, because Langer’s bank - like most banks - activates a newly created user ID only after verifying it by speaking to the customer who has requested it. When she typed this last part in, the caller noticed she had turned 80 just weeks earlier and wished her a belated happy birthday.

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She didn’t do online banking too often and couldn’t remember her user name.įrustrated, the caller opened her bank’s internet banking registration form on her computer screen, created a new user name and password for her and asked her to fill out the required details - including her address, Social Security number and birth date. Langer made a couple of unsuccessful attempts to log in. “Because of a technical issue with our system, we won’t be able to refund your money on your credit card or mail you a check,” he said. Because the protection was being terminated, he told her, leaving the software on the computer would cause it to crash.Īfter he gained access to her desktop, using the program TeamViewer, the caller asked Langer to log into her bank to accept the refund, $399, which he was going to transfer into her account. When Langer asked why this was necessary, he said he needed to remove his company’s software from her machine.

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He asked her to turn on her computer and led her through a series of steps so that he could access it remotely. She had no reason to doubt the caller, who spoke with an Indian accent and said his name was Roger.

Langer, who has a warm and kind voice, couldn’t remember purchasing the plan in question, but at her age, she didn’t quite trust her memory. The reason for the call, he explained, was to process a refund the company owed Langer for antivirus and anti-hacking protection that had been sold to her and was now being discontinued. One afternoon in December 2019, Kathleen Langer, an elderly grandmother who lives by herself in Crossville, Tenn., got a phone call from a person who said he worked in the refund department of her computer manufacturer.

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