By Charles C. W. Cooke
Saturday, February 17, 2024
At the Cut, a freelance financial-advice columnist named Charlotte Cowles weaves a story of credulousness and incompetence that is so absurd as to be nigh-on impossible to believe. Cowles’s piece is titled, The Day I Put $50,000 in a Shoe Box and Handed It to a Stranger: I never thought I was the kind of person to fall for a scam, and, somehow, its contents are more remarkable than that headline suggests. Across more than 5,000 self-indulgent words, Cowles tells the tale of a single day last October, on which she fell for one of the most far-fetched and obvious con-jobs I’ve ever had the misfortune to encounter. The saga takes a while to unfold, but the bottom line of the thing is that Cowles received an unsolicited phone call from someone purporting to be from Amazon, and ended up handing 50 grand in cash to a stranger in a white Mercedes. If you’ve ever spent any time wondering whether our elite class might be a touch misnamed, then this is the essay for you.
I have read Cowles’s story four times now, and I must confess that I am still struggling to believe that it is real. I offer that judgment in spite of, rather than because of, my low regard for most journalists — who, in the twelve years since I moved to the United States, I have found almost uniquely gullible as a class. If, indeed, the events of last Halloween went down as Cowles insists that they did, then she ought to be congratulated for her achievement: She has, in a single day, demonstrated exactly why Americans have such a low regard for the press. And if the events didn’t go down like that? Then I’d like to know what did. Given the professional humiliation to which Cowles has subjected herself with her confession, it’s hard to imagine that she has made up the whole story. Nevertheless, there are elements of her tale that have given me pause, and, in the interest of laying down a marker, I thought I’d flag them here for posterity.
Essentially, my incredulity can be divided into three groups: (1) That which flows from the holes in Cowles’s story; (2) That which results from the questions Cowles seems not to have asked before handing over $50,000 to a stranger; and (3) That which results from the details of her story not making sense on its own terms. I will run through all three here, as comprehensively as possible.
Into the first group of questions I have — those that result from holes or discrepancies in the story — I would place the following:
· Cowles’s description of getting the money from the bank is oddly perfunctory relative to much of the rest of her testimony. She doesn’t mention which bank she visited — or which branch of it — and she doesn’t relate whether the bank made her fill in any paperwork, or whether it told her that it would be filing a federal currency transaction report and notifying the IRS (which is legally mandatory for cash withdrawals over $10,000). She says she got the money from “the teller,” who took $50,000 from “a large metal box of $100 bills” and handed her only the money and “a sheet of paper warning me against scams.” Most people do not walk into banks and take out $50,000 in cash. Some banks have daily limits on cash withdrawals, and those that don’t are usually interested in people who suddenly need tens of thousands of dollars for no obvious reason. This part of Cowles’s mistake seemed to happen unusually easily in her account. Why? I asked Cowles about this by email and have received no reply.
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· Cowles mentions early on in her piece that the scammers had the “last four” digits of her Social Security number, but later on she writes that the scammers “read me my Social Security number.” Which is it? Did they have the whole thing or just the “last four”? I asked Cowles about this by email and have received no reply.
· Cowles says that she was texted photographs of a fake government “badge” and of “a Treasury check,” but she didn’t include these in her piece. Why not? I asked Cowles about this by email and have received no reply.
· Cowles says that she was given instructions on how to file “reports with the FBI and FTC.” That’s not the same thing as confirming that she actually filed those reports. Did she file them? And if not, why not? I asked Cowles about this by email and have received no reply.
Into the second group — problems with the scammer’s story that, inexplicably, never seem to have occurred to Cowles, or that didn’t cause her to call it off — we can place these problems:
· Cowles seems quite conservative with her money, but she handed over $50,000 quite easily. She didn’t even wait until the following day. This seems out of character.
· Cowles studied at Columbia. As such, she must have at least a passing familiarity with America’s legal system. Why, then — especially in a case in which she was the victim — did she believe that a government official would tell her, “If you talk to an attorney, I cannot help you anymore . . . you will be considered noncooperative. Your home will be raided, and your assets will be seized. You may be arrested. It’s your choice”? Why did she prefer handing $50,000 in cash in a shoebox over to a stranger to taking advantage of America’s system of due process? And what, exactly, was the financial urgency she felt? Cowles submits that she did not have “any other choice”? But why? None of her money had been taken or frozen. She had seen no signs of identity theft in her daily life. She hadn’t been arrested or charged. How, precisely, would handing over $50,000 in cash — without ever asking how she would be able to access it once she had — improve on the status quo?
· Why did Cowles not question being told that she couldn’t tell anyone about this — including her husband? She’s not Jason Bourne.
· How did we get so quickly from the alleged Amazon representative who called her asking if, as a courtesy, he could connect Cowles with “a liaison at the Federal Trade Commission” to her being told she did “not have much time” and was being “charged with cybercrimes, money laundering, and drug trafficking”? Why didn’t she think that this was absurd? Why didn’t she ask why she was being “charged” if the government knew she was the victim of identity theft? Why didn’t she notice that the caller kept alternating between saying she was being “charged” and saying she was being “investigated for major federal crimes”? And why, if the government was trying to prosecute her, would an agent of that government be helping her avoid prosecution? Why, at any point, didn’t she ask these questions of her interlocutors?
· Cowles says she was told that “all of your assets under your current identity are part of the investigation,” but that “if we secure this cash and then issue you a government check under your new Social Security number, that will be considered clean money.” But why would physical cash be treated as such where a check would not? Surely, if she were under investigation to the point at which she could not talk to her husband or consult a lawyer, withdrawing $50,000 from her bank would raise more suspicion, not less? How was she supposed to make purchases with a $50,000 “government check” that she couldn’t deposit in a bank account? And why would a government agency that was “investigating” and “charging” a person want to perform this service for that person anyway?
· Cowles says she acquiesced because she was scared for her son. But she never seems to have asked the government for protection. Why not? Why would a government agent who was supposedly trying to help her keep warning that her she was in danger and under surveillance, but not offer to make sure her family was safe?
· Why would the government agent who picked up the money need to be undercover if he was picking up money for the government? Who would he be hiding from? Why did she believe this?
· Why did Cowles accept an incoming call as proof of identity when she had just been given the “direct phone line” of the alleged government agent? And if she was worried that that, too, was fake, why didn’t she compare it to the number she found on “the FTC home page”? Why didn’t she call the number she was asked to look up online, instead of having it call her? Evidently, she was suspicious about this and yet, despite that suspicion, she accepted the answer she was given, which was that, as a “government number,” “it cannot be spoofed? Worst still, she kept accepting that answer — with no more due diligence than a brief Google search — even when accepting it was costing her $50,000 in cash. Why?
And, into the third and final group, we can place the parts of Cowles’s story that sound peculiar in and of themselves, in that they do not sound consistent with what we know about how con artists operate, and thus make me wonder if her story has been amended or fabricated in some way:
· Cowles implies that she has dealt with the federal government since she was scammed. But she doesn’t relate whether anyone has told her whether the scam to which she was subjected is common. Usually, scammers follow their playbooks more than once. Have they? If not, then why was Cowles the only victim? I asked Cowles about this by email and have received no reply.
· Why was Cowles chosen as a target in the first place? Normally, scammers hook a person first, and then get that person to provide their details to them. But the scammers seem to have known a lot about Cowles from the start — including that she had a small child. How? And why choose her? She’s a financial journalist. Wouldn’t she be the worst person in the world to do this to? The scammers seemed relatively sophisticated. Why did they select someone who presumably has a bunch of high-level contacts?
· Why would the scammers be so keen to get physically near to Cowles? Scammers usually hope to stay as far away from their marks as possible. Had Cowles called the police and had them set up a sting, the game would have been up when the scammer’s car pulled up and accepted the cash. Why take that risk?
It is possible — likely, in fact — that the ultimate answer to all of these questions is that Cowles is profoundly stupid. Or, to invert Cowles’s own words: It is possible that she got scammed because she is, in fact, “hysterical, or a rube.” If so, she has no business being a financial-advice columnist, whose sole professional role is to advise others about money. And if not? Well, then she’s giving Jussie Smollett a run for his money.
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