This is a heads-up about a clever new scam making the rounds — one that has the evil-doers hiding behind the name of a legitimate company.
A friend received an email from someone claiming to be from Geek Squad, telling him that his debit card was being billed $240 for services rendered.
There is a real Geek Squad — it’s a tech support division of Best Buy. But this email was not from them, but from scammers.
JP — my friend — had no account with Geek Squad, so he called his bank to cancel the payment. But the bank told him to reply to the email first and dispute the charge.
Only if that didn’t work would the bank act.
So he called the phone number given on the email, and talked with a “customer representative.” This piece of slime, on hearing JP’s story, apologized profusely and offered to refund the payment immediately.
To enable this, he was to log in to a website (which was obviously a fake), and download a program that would enable him to claim his refund. JP did so.
Here a clever piece of swindling occurred. When he logged on to the site, he was told to type in the amount of the refund. So he typed in $240.
But the website altered the amount he’d typed in to $24,000. When he drew the customer representative’s attention to the error, he was led though a correction process.
First he was told it was too late to stop the transfer, the funds had already been deposited in his bank account. He could confirm this by signing in to his online banking account during the call, which he did.
At first, there was no sign of the $24,000 refund. He was told to try again, and sure enough, this time the “refund” was there.
Now by inference, what actually happened is that in logging in to the fake website, he unwittingly enabled the scammers to see his computer screen.
When he called up his online balance, the fake Geek Squad person could read it. They then altered it to record the $24,000 refund.
To correct the overpayment, he was then told to enter a new website, allegedly for Chase Bank, which is another real company. Here he had to explain that instead of $240, he’d mistakenly been refunded $24,000, and promise to return the difference — $23,760.
The “bank” gave him details of an account in Hong Kong, and he was asked to send by wire transfer the overpayment he’d received.
By now JP smelled a rat, and called his bank back. His bank’s screen showed the refund of $24,000, but the teller assured him it was a fake.
The giveaway, apparently, was the request for a wire transfer. The bank had heard that story before. The “cash” wasn’t really there; it was only a paper entry and would disappear in due course.
He was told to change his bank password, because the people claiming to be from Geek Squad had presumably read that when he opened his online account.
Then, he was told, all would be well, though he should scrub his computer for viruses that may have been implanted.
Apologies for the complex nature of this story. But it’s a sophisticated scam that needs as much airing as possible.
Bottom line, if you get an email from Geek Squad, don’t open it. Kill it immediately.
Unless, of course, you’ve dealt with them face-to-face at their store and you were expecting an email from them.
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