As the year draws to a close, ‘tis the season for online shopping, and all the scams that come with it. According to the Australian Government’s Scamwatch website, we’ve already lost $4 million in 2019 to online shopping scams – way more than last year. They also reckon that “reported losses have tripled over the last three years”, so that’s terrifying.
It’s obviously been a big year for scams and scammers, so I figured I’d recap the year in scams in an effort for us all to go into 2020 with a bit more knowledge and caution.
Caroline Calloway
This one just eeked into 2019, with Caroline going on a tour or workshops in early January. The “one woman Fyre Fest” was charging $165 for workshops on how to be yourself, but the people who attended wound up sitting on the floor eating lettuce. If you want to go in for the deep dive, there was a whole viral Twitter thread dedicated to the slowly-unfolding trainwreck.
If that wasn’t enough for one year, Caroline’s ex-bestie wrote a massive personal essay that dropped in September all about their friendship and spilled all sorts of tea.
Casey Donovan’s Catfish
Earlier this year, Casey Donovan opened up in an interview about how she spent six years being catfished. When she was 16, she fell in love with who she thought was a man named Campbell, only to find out that he was completely made up by her best friend, Olga.
It was a very intense relationship, and even involved ‘Campbell’ asking Casey to have sex with Olga. She says she’s forgiven Olga now, and “there’s some anger there definitely but I had to let it go to move forwards.”
Chinese Embassy Scam
This one began last year, but kept going well into 2019. Robocalls with a recorded message in Mandarin claim to be from a government official who tells the person that they’ve been involved in a crime of some description, or that their identity has been stolen. Then the message says they’ll be transferred to the ‘investigators’ or ‘police’, and when the scammer picks up, they demand bank account details, passports, and cash payments.
This one was particularly dangerous, and the US version of the scam saw people lose about $40 million.
myGov Tax Scam
This was the major scammy-scam of 2019. Around tax time, scammers impersonating the Australian Tax Office were calling around to people and telling them that they needed to pay a debt or were entitled to a refund. By asking for personal details so they could either ‘pay your refund’ or ‘collect your debt’, the scammers managed to commit a bunch of tax fraud and even identity theft.
Scammers are assholes, that’s the bottom line. Stay safe in 2020, and for the love of God, don’t try and scam anyone.