I'm not following this.
She wired the money to her boyfriend. Her boyfriend wired the money back to her. They showed the scammer the receipt, but the wiring was between her and her boyfriend. Unless I've read it wrong repeatedly, they never actually wired money to the scammer. So how exactly did the scammer get their money? Is there banking information that allows your identity to be stolen on a moneygram receipt? Is there some kind of password involved? It would be really helpful to know where precisely the security leak was.
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Here is what happened, this description of the scam is part of the wikipedia entry for MoneyGram:
Another scam is that the criminal asks the buyer to send money to a friend or relative of the buyer as proof of good faith. The criminal will then send the item and when received, the buyer releases the funds. The problem is, even if the buyer designates a specific pick-up location for the funds (i.e. near the friend or relative), the money can in fact be picked up with fake ID anywhere in the world. In a variation of this scam, the good faith payment is made to a friend or relative to provide 'proof' of funds for an apartment the buyer is trying to rent from the criminal. The criminal will insist that the 'proof' be provided via MoneyGram and not any other method, such as a money order. The funds are then intercepted by the criminal.
I recently got a call from a man in NYC who was taken by the same type of scam. The scammer gave him a phone number - and it was ours. (We still have a NYC number in addition to our local one.)
The man felt like such an idiot - he told me he's educated, a lawyer, and he can't believe he got taken this way. But apartments are very hard to find in NYC. People do strange things when seemingly good deals are dangled in front of them.
Wow, I could never have seen that sort of thing coming! In general I know that you don't wire money to strange people, but I could never have figured out independently - or thought to research - how they could intercept a transaction like that!
Yeah, I don't know if I would have seen it coming, either. I don't remember hearing about this before, but after reading the news story you posted, all I did was search on "MoneyGram scam" at Google. I wonder why the scam is not detailed in the story? It almost feels like it was omitted or edited out by accident. Maybe they just didn't want to get too detailed to avoid encouraging copycats, but I think a better explanation of what happened belongs in the story.
All scams tick me off, but I find this one particularly irksome. Taking advantage of a trusting nature and of the belief the person at the other end is genuinely trying to help you out is about as low as a scammer can get, IMO. Instead of assuming that people are generally good (which I think is true), this changes the assumption to everyone is an evil criminal out to scam you. I think we all lose more than money (which is bad enough) when that happens.
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