Our company provides fraud prevention tools for e-commerce sites. I provide chat support on our site, which occasionally brings in some… interesting… characters.

Visitor: “I need to get an SMS by Phone Number USA for verify my account in the site. Can you help me?”

Me: “You want to do SMS verification for accounts on your site?”

SMS verification is when the site sends a text message to you with a passcode that you need to enter back into the site to continue. It confirms that you own the phone number you are providing.

Visitor: “It’s site [website]. Help me.”

Me: “I’m sorry, I’m having some trouble understanding what sort of help you’re looking for.”

Visitor: “One SMS for verify by USA phone number.”

Me: “You need to have your account on [sitename].com verified?”

Visitor: “Yes.”

Me: “Sorry, that’s not something I can help with.”

Visitor: “One Amazon gift card $5 for you. Just one SMS.”

Me: “We’re in the business of preventing the exact sort of fraud you’re asking me to help with. Why do you think a $5 gift card is going to change my mind? Have a nice day.”

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I work at an institution for further adult education and we offer a very broad variety of courses and workshops, from IT-classes to cooking, music, languages, college degrees, etc. There are also some federal support programs in place that help pay the tuition for people who live on low-income or have none at all.

As a part of this, the responsible federal office also offers to pay for the driving expenses if a student lives more than a certain amount of kilometers from the school. If that is the case, the student can apply for this additional support and, once it is granted, they need to provide us proof of their travel expenses — i.e. expired bus or train tickets. We then relay this information to the federal office, who in turn refunds the money.

A man has just come to my office to give us his tickets. Usually, our customers and students are very polite and pleasant to deal with, but occasionally, we get an odd one like this.

Man: “Hello, I want to give you my bus ticket.” *Hands it over*

Me: “Thank you very much. Can I see your ID, please?”

Man: “Sure, here.”

Me: “Thank you.”

I write down his name on the receipt form we have for these cases and then proceed to check the ticket. I notice something.

Me: “Um, sir, it seems to me that someone has tampered with this ticket. There is something written over the print with a black marker. Do you know what that is about?”

Man: “Huh? No, I did not do that. I don’t know.”

I show him the ticket.

Me: “Are you sure? Here, look. The date of expiry of this ticket has clearly been written over, apparently in an attempt to change it to a later date.”

He looks as if he only notices it now.

Man: “Oh, yes, that was me!”

Me: “Uh, you know you are not supposed to do that, right? It is not allowed to alter your bus tickets like this, and you could get fined for doing it.”

Man: *Apparently still oblivious* “But no one ever said anything about it before.”

Me: “You are still not allowed to tamper with your tickets! Plus, if the federal office learns about this, you might be in real trouble because they might think you are trying to deceive them or commit fraud.”

Man: “Oh, but I don’t want to deceive the federal office. I only wanted to deceive the bus driver.”

He smiles and leaves.

Me: “Did… he really just tell me that?!”

I am the OP of this story. This is another story from the same hotel.

This same night auditor from the previous story continues to work at the hotel for months. He does take on a few day shifts but still occasionally will not show up for a shift and is not held accountable.  

One time he comes in for his shift at 4:00 am, five hours late, while I have stayed and started the auditing process (as I now have been conveniently trained due to/during the first story).

This continues on for some time until our front office manager notices that our two slot machines in the bar are short exactly $100 every Friday and Saturday night. After a few weekends of this continuing, they contact the police and set up cameras.

The cameras capture the night auditor stealing from the machines by popping the back doors open.

The police review the footage and obtain warrants to search his home; I’m not sure of the specific details here. They search his home and find that not only has he been stealing money, but he has a handwritten list of credit card numbers with names and CVV codes from customers of the hotel. Worse yet, it is actually his parents’ house and they have been running a meth lab out of the basement.

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We have an all store meeting on a Sunday morning where they have multiple stations set up to have all employees working their opening and closing pitches to customers. It is some major push with corporate to better understand customers through pitching them products or some such nonsense.

As I work in the service department, it doesn’t apply to my direct coworkers or me, but we have to show up anyway. One of the stations, though, is actually with the customer service workers who are going over ways to avoid fraud. One of the store managers who is directly over customer service is there, too.

All the employees are put into groups. My group is the third group to go to this station, so two others have already gone. 

Representative #1: “We need to make sure that, on checks, the name on the check matches their driver’s ID as well as address. Standard operating procedure is to write the customer’s ID number on the check.”

Manager: “If the customer has stolen a debit card but has the PIN, there really isn’t much we can do since we never look at the debit card if they put in the PIN. With a credit card or a transaction going through as credit, though, we can stop fraud completely because we have to put in the CID number on the back of the card so we can match the card with the customer’s ID.”

Representative #2: “Honestly, it doesn’t matter if the name isn’t right because the whole thing would be between the person who had the card stolen and that person’s bank. So, we could technically stay out of it.”

Me: “So… when it comes to cards we don’t need to stop fraud or have no way of doing it?”

Manager: “With debits, not really, but with credit cards, you match the ID. Weren’t you listening?”

Me: “I was, but [Representative #2] just said that really the whole thing is between the person who lost the card and the bank. So, we can catch the fraud but honestly, there isn’t a point to if we still get paid and the person who lost the card isn’t technically on the hook for the charges applied to the card. Basically talking about cards at all is kind of useless.”

Manager: “Well… I mean, we can stop fraud by looking at the ID.”

Representative #2: *To me* “But it doesn’t matter since it’s between the bank and the person.”

Me: “Yep, we can stop fraud by looking at the ID of the person with the credit card, but if we were to skip that entirely and just take the card, the person who had the card stolen could call their bank and not be on the hook for those charges.”

Representative #1, Representative #2, and Manager: “Yes.”

Me: “We’re the third group through here, right?”

I work in Medicare insurance, getting people coverage through part C and part D. My job has many, many rules, and serious consequences for breaking them. One caller’s situation stands out.

She called in the middle of February, distraught, because another agent had called her and signed up for a new plan. 

This — in the first minute of the call — was my first red flag. It is illegal for a Medicare insurance agent in Wisconsin to cold call anyone, as well as to enroll them in a new insurance plan on an outbound call; agents can only ever enroll people who called them.

After sign-up, she’d run into trouble getting her prescriptions refilled, so she’d wanted to talk to her agent again. She’d spent more than a week trying to get in touch with him and had eventually found my number, thinking that my office was Medicare itself.

My office’s name does have Medicare in the title, but we always immediately clarify that we do not work for the government.

My workplace has an unusual approach to callers: no matter what they called about, spend at least ten minutes helping and continue to help for as long as they need. We are a sales office, but we’re paid hourly and our commission is negligible in order to support this behavior.

I start asking questions and track down the plan she’s been signed into. My first bit of good news is that it’s a plan that I’m contracted with; I can pull up the full contract and can figure out the answers to every one of her questions, but with every question she asks, my internal alarm bells chime a little louder.

Insurance agents are supposed to be responsible to their customers. Whoever this other agent was, he left her not knowing most of what she needed to know; he’d effectively bullied her into changing and then left her high and dry.

The medicine issue was actually coincidental; I told her what she needed to tell her pharmacist to clear things up but asked her to stay on the line and answer a few more questions, and I checked to make sure her family doctor was in the network of her new plan.

He was not, and the other agent had not even told her that changing plans would have restricted her from seeing him. This could have cost her thousands of dollars!

That medication issue that sent her to me saved her from an untold amount of hassle. The plan change could only go into effect at the beginning of the next month; the new plan wasn’t in place yet, and we could overwrite or cancel it just by submitting the paperwork.

I did one last piece of digging. Election periods are the times of year that a person is allowed the opportunity to change their coverage. If this other agent had submitted a change, what had he used? He hadn’t mentioned this to my caller at all. A quick rundown of options left only one answer. The other agent had used an election period called OEP to change her coverage.

OEP is effectively an emergency exit at the start of the year for when someone finds out that their plan is not suitable to their needs. Agents are prohibited from advertising or even mentioning OEP on calls; the customer must request a change or express distress before OEP can be brought up. Using OEP without the customer knowing or even understanding what was being done? Egregious.

So, I go through the paperwork with her and get her signed back into the plan that she had originally, and I give her the appropriate phone numbers to check up with her plan to ensure that she won’t have any trouble. But before we disconnect, I have one final errand for her.

I give her the phone number of the Commissioner of Insurance of the State of Wisconsin: the regulating body responsible for cracking down on bad insurance agents.

Let’s run it down, shall we?

Cold-calling a Medicare insurance customer, uninvited? $25,000 fine. Per person, if he’s called others.

Enrolling her on an outbound call, willfully signing her up into an unsuitable plan, and abusing OEP? Forfeiture of license, along with twice the value of any money they hoped to gain by doing this, plus a $5,000 fine and up to three years in prison. 

That’s three counts of it, mind you, so up to six times the money he tried to make, a $15,000 fine, and nine years in prison, and probably being banned from insurance work in the United States for life.

If he’s done it to one innocent old woman, he’s probably done it to others. I will never know the fallout from the case, but knowing the tools at the Commissioner’s fingertips, I’m reasonably confident I got a swindler his comeuppance.

This story was featured in our May 2020 roundup!

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