Imposter scams where the scammers pose as a government employee, such as with the IRS or a company with which you do business such as your bank are unfortunately often very successful in stealing your money.  They generally convince you that there is an emergency that requires you to pay them money directly or, as is often the case, send money to designated accounts that you are told would be held for you to protect your funds. Recently Arsiln Chaudhry, a 21 years customer of USAA took a phone call that his Caller ID indicated was from USAA’s customer service department, however, the truth is that the call was from a scammer using a simple technique called “spoofing” to manipulate Chaudhry’s Caller ID to make the call appear to come from USAA.  The scammer, posing as a bank employee told Chaudhry that someone was attempting to take $8,500 from his account and told him that he needed to transfer the money from his account to another account provided by the bank in order to protect his funds.  Unfortunately, Chaudhry moved $15,000 before recognizing that he had been scammed.

If this sounds familiar, you may remember in 2025 when I told you about  Minnesota Vikings linebacker Dallas Turner falling prey to a similar imposter scam where he received a phone call from a scammer posing as an employee of Chase, his bank informing him that someone had tried to access his bank account and that in order to protect his money he needed to wire it to two different accounts at two different Chase banks, which Turner did before he realized after speaking with a family member that he had been scammed.

TIPS

The biggest red flag in this type of scam is to remember that no bank or governmental agency will ever under any circumstances direct you to withdraw your funds and put them into another account provided by the scammer.

If you do receive a call, text message or phone call about a threat to your account, you can never be sure that the person contacting you as legitimate, so you should never provide personal information, make a payment or click on a link in any such communication.  Rather, if you think the communication may be legitimate, merely call your bank or other company involved at a phone number you know is accurate to find out the truth.

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