The FBI released a public service announcement, warning of criminals who are spoofing the FBI’s own Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3).

The IC3 is the government’s online portal, where victims can make detailed reports to the FBI when they fall victim to internet or computer schemes. By spoofing this website, crooks hope to lure people in with the purpose of gathering personal information, including banking information and details of the crime.

Criminals create spoofed websites by just slightly altering the words or using an alternative spelling of the web address of a legitimate website. Or they use a different domain, changing the .gov domain to .com or .org. In the case of the IC3, they might change the legitimate web address (www.IC3.gov) to appear as www.1C3.com.

The spoofing of the FBI complaint website is not unique. A couple of weeks ago, a Clinton woman reported she saw an ad on Facebook promoting online chair yoga for seniors. To participate, she needed to open a link to sign up and take a survey.

This sounded interesting to the woman, so she clicked open the link, took the survey, and signed up, using her credit card to pay $34.99 for three months of chair yoga. But the credit card provider kicked the charge back almost immediately, labeling it as fraud. When we looked into it, we saw the website associated with the Facebook ad appeared as “Fit-Me”, very close to a real and popular fitness app “Fitme”.

Scammers also work hard to produce authentic-looking documents to support their phony stories. Here’s a few of the fakes turned in to me by Iowa residents in the last couple of months:

• A Jackson County woman wanted to sell out of her time-share. She paid a considerable amount to what turned out to be a scam company who promised to sell her property. Nothing happened. Someone else contacted her and claimed they worked for the U.S. government, which recovered her stolen money, and wanted to return it to her. To puff up his credibility, this caller sent her faked copies of IRS forms and U.S. Treasury forms, and U.S. court records about the prosecution of time-share scammers in 2012. This worked to persuade her to send more money to recover what she already lost.
• A DeWitt woman received a call telling her someone stole and used her social security number in committing crimes. To help catch these criminals, the caller wanted the woman to buy gold. To convince the woman the caller was legitimate, he emailed her official-looking government documents showing how her money was held as a bond for safekeeping at the U.S. Treasury.
• A Camanche woman became involved in an online romance with a man who claimed to live in Texas. He told her he claimed her as his wife when filing federal tax returns. When the woman’s family later became suspicious, they learned someone indeed filed an income tax return in her name, using her information to prepare a fake W-2, which showed her employer withheld $660,000 from her salary, and wanted that refunded.
• A Clinton woman lost a great deal of money trying to buy a puppy off the internet. After she realized her mistakes, she received messages from online sleuths who promised to recover her missing money. When she inquired further, the criminals directed her to a bank website, which they said showed $92,000 of her money, just setting there, for her to reclaim – if she paid them a fee.

There’s a couple of precautions when looking for websites:

• Avoid any search engine results labeled as “sponsored”. Sponsored means someone paid to get their result highly placed – scammers do this to deter traffic from legitimate sites to faked ones. Not all “sponsored” sites are scams, but enough of them are to use caution.
• Instead of relying on a search engine to find a website, type the official website into your address bar, if you know it.
• If you are not convinced of a website’s authenticity, never share sensitive information there.

It’s very easy for grifters and thieves to fake almost any official document to include real-looking signatures. If you find yourself looking at something you don’t understand, from someone who wants your money, ask for help.

Contact Seniors vs. Crime

Let me know about scams, fraud, or other crookedness you run across. Most of what I learn, I learn from you. Contact me at Seniors vs. Crime, Clinton County Sheriff’s Office, 563-242-9211, extension 4433, or email me at randymeier@gapa911.us.

Randy Meier is the director of Seniors vs. Crime.