It’s happened to an increasingly large number of people: They’re clicking away on some less-reputable website when a pop-up advises them that their computer has been breached and their financial information exposed, but there’s one way to save the day.
For a couple in Maine last year, that way was to call someone who claimed to be with Fidelity Investments. This false representative told the couple, according to an FBI report, to download the UltraViewer software on their computer to monitor for fraud. That done, the rep told the couple to transfer some of their retirement funds and take out a home equity line of credit and wire it all to a cryptocurrency marketplace for “safekeeping.”
It was, of course, a scam. That couple, one of the 65 victims in Maine last year, lost $1.1 million to the fake tech support scammer, which was probably devastating to their finances but hardly a drop in the total pool of $347 million lost by nearly 24,000 victims across the U.S. last year, according to tracking data from the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center.
That’s a 137% year-over-year increase over those scammed in the same way.
Of New England’s 809 victims, populous Massachusetts saw the highest losses with nearly $5.4 million lost by 521 victims, nearly 4 ½ times as much as the next highest victimized state in the region, New Hampshire.
And, like the romance scams and — especially — the “Grandparent” scams reported in the past by the Herald, the victims…
