Man Reveals Scam That Almost Led to His Mom 'Losing All Her Life Savings'

A man has revealed how close his mom got to "losing all her life savings" to online scammers.

In a thread posted to Twitter under the handle james_blue_cat, writer James Henry described what unfolded after he received a call from his mom telling him "her laptop was playing up."

However, it was only when he went over to her house to help that he discovered what was really going on. Henry told Newsweek that he was sharing the story in the hope "it might save someone going through the same (or worse)."

Older web users and the elderly in general are increasingly being targeted by online scams.

According to an FBI report compiled by the Internet Crime Complaint Center, in 2022 the total losses reported by elderly victims had risen an astonishing 84 per cent from the figures filed in 2021.

The report noted that tech and customer support schemes were the most common type of fraud perpetrated with victims over the age of 60 filing 17,800 complaints related to crimes of this type.

Henry's mom, a retired lunch lady, very nearly fell for a similar scam. A few days ago she called him one day around lunch time to say her laptop was frozen and she was "trying to talk to someone from Microsoft about it."

She was struggling to "understand" what the woman on the phone was saying, so asked Henry, who lives a 10-minute drive away, to come over. "I didn't think it was a scam at the time," he said. "It just sounded fiddly and technical."

That quickly changed when he got to the house. His mom was in the process of ending the call when Henry spotted something alarming. "I realized she'd brought up her bank account on the screen," he said. "She said the man had asked her to go through them to make sure nothing had been taken, but I was already worried."

He then noticed that the person on the phone had managed to get his mom to install OnlyDesk on her laptop, which would allow them to access her computer remotely. He deleted the program and closed his mom's laptop, switching over to his own computer to "check nothing had been taken" and change all of her passwords "as quickly as possible."

"I had a bad feeling that as soon as the call ended the scammers were going to get to work, so we had to lock them out before they could take anything," Henry said.

They then spent around two and a half hours on the phone to his mom's banks and changing her various passwords. "It took my mum a while to realize this was potentially very serious," he said. "She was quite upset, but she's very organized, so we were able to go through all the accounts quite methodically, and she felt a lot better at the end."

His mom's laptop has now been taken to a local computer repair store to be "deep cleaned" on the advice of one of her banks. Once that is done, the account they tried to access will be unfrozen.

Henry is still not sure how this happened. " Possibly she clicked on some link, but she's pretty careful normally," he said. "There's a real push to get older people to use online banking, as a lot of the bank's branches are closing, but sadly that's just going to expose them to fraud."

He was able to take a screenshot of the message that appeared on his mom's computer and spread the word about the scam on Twitter, in a thread that has been viewed over 1.1 million times. "I think it's only just sinking in now that she was *this* close to losing all her life savings," he wrote in the thread.

It turned out she was one of the lucky ones though. "So many people responded to that twitter thread telling me their parents had been victims of something similar and lost thousands of pounds, it's absolutely heart-breaking," Henry said.

He's told his mom to be wary of being called or emailed by anyone claiming to work for Microsoft or one of her banks. She's also promised to tell Henry if she has even the "slightest suspicion" something is wrong with her computer.

Ultimately, Henry said the ordeal has changed the way his mom uses her laptop. "My mum's quite adept with computers, but I think this will make her a lot more wary now, which is for the best, but also rather sad," he said.

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