Bea Brossart wishes she would have paused for a moment.
Instead, the 87-year-old woman lost $5,000 to a scammer.
Late last week she was on her laptop when it suddenly crashed, she told Global News.
She said she saw flashing lights and a message telling her that her finances were at risk. It said she should call a number it provided.
Brossart trades stocks throughout the day and sells them before markets close, a practice known as day trading. She was worried that money was at risk.
She called the number. She learned she was speaking to someone who said their name was Johnathon and he said he was calling from California.
“Apparently, I was being charged $6,000 for a dating service of some kind,” she told Global News.
“So, he said, ‘Well, we have to balance that with gift cards.”
Brossart spent the next 10 hours on the phone with the scammer, driving around Saskatoon. She visited multiple locations of stores like Sephora, Staples and Wal-Mart and bought many different gift cards. She was directed to buy Google Play, Steam and Sephora cards most.
She was on the phone with scammer the whole time. He told her not to speak to anyone about what was going on.
She usually purchased the cards worth $50, though the person on the phone kept pushing her to buy cards worth more.
“The Bay would give me $1,500 cards, which I bought. I bought two Bay (cards).”
She would return from the stores to her car where she would scratch the back of the cards to expose the unique code. She would read it to the person on the phone
She maxed out one of her credit cards and had to switch to another.
It was one of her daughters, Lynette, who figured out what was happening.
She said she normally speaks to her mom often and grew concerned when she hadn’t heard from her for hours.
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“The whole time, I was thinking my mom could have had a heart attack. She’s 87. She could have had a heart attack,” Lynette said.
She called and texted several times and eventually went to her mom’s apartment. She could see the lights were on but no one answered. She texted her nephew, who was set to have dinner with his grandma that night. He told her the two of them had rescheduled.
Hours later, Brossart finally responded.
Brossard told her daughter she wasn’t supposed to speak about what was going on.
“And I said, Mom, that’s the first sign that you’ve been scammed.”
When Brossart showed up at the house, Lynette said she looked exhausted.
“Her eyes were all red and thought she looked like in shock, really,” Lynette said.
During the interview Lynette showed Global News the stack of approximately 20 Google Play gift cards Brossart purchased. When she spread them out they looked like playing cards.
They called Brossart’s bank to suspend her credit cards and the next day they went to the police.
After filing a report, they began visiting the stores to see if she could return the cards. She couldn’t, though they did see “Johnathon” had called again —16 times, in fact.
Shortly after that he called Lynette once more, demanding she keep buying more gift cards.
Brossart passed the phone to Lynette.
“I just said, ‘I can’t believe what you’ve done to an 87-year-old woman,” she said.
She then demanded he buy gift cards and give her the codes.
After asking if he had a conscience — to which he said he did — they hung up.
Lynette said she later tried calling him at the 1-800 number from which he called but it didn’t connect through.
The same was true when Global New tried calling the number.
In a statement, Saskatoon police said officers couldn’t do anything.
“…unfortunately there is no investigative avenue for us to pursue since the gift card numbers were already provided,” spokesperson Brad Jennings said.
The statement said gift cards and cryptocurrencies are the two most common form of payment for fraud schemes and it’s impossible to follow up on them “in any practical sense.”
Jennings also wrote the SPS economic crime section said people should be skeptical of any approach they did not initiate. He urged people to be wary of urgent-looking pop-up messages and not to click on them or call the numbers they provide.
And Jennings said no legitimate company will call and claim your computer is infected with a virus.
Yale Holder, a vice-president responsible for customer experiences with Moneris, a financial technology company focusing on payment processing, said it’s best to ignore pop-up message while online.
“I have an 80-year-old aunt that calls me on a regular basis about the messages that she gets on her laptop,” he said, speaking from Toronto.
“She says she gets it from Microsoft, she gets it from the banks, she gets it from a number of different businesses that she recognizes, and she wants to know what to do. So the one thing that I tell her to do over and over again is to just click the X.”
He said Moneris has noticed a large increase in fraud attempts through the pandemic and especially lately, as many businesses reopen.
He said people and business owners should use common sense and caution and beware of anything that seems too good to be true.
Brossart said she’ll be alright after losing so much, and that she’s happy she didn’t give the scammer the entire amount he was after.
She said she hopes others learn from her mistakes.
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