I’m a 76-year-old widow — I lost my life savings to a devastating phone scam
An elderly widow from Arizona feels “devastated” after losing her entire life savings of $25,000 to telephone scammers last month.
Susan Guthrie, 76, was conned by fraudsters who posed as Microsoft employees and talked her into depositing the money into their account, SWNS reports.
They convinced her that her computer had been hacked and unless she transferred the money, it was at risk of being stolen.
“I felt credible about the scammers, and I felt assured that they would take care of the problem,” lamented Guthrie, of Mesa. “Once I found out, I was devastated. I felt really foolish.”
Sarah-Lynn Guthrie says the scammers gained access to her mom’s computer on Feb. 5 after she clicked a pop-up, which provided a fake Microsoft number.
Over the phone, the scammers instructed Guthrie to transfer her life savings to them for safekeeping until the hackers could be stopped.
Guthrie told the Arizona Republic last week that the scammers gave her Microsoft identification information and treated her with kindness.
“What’s really sick was that she was telling the scammers, ‘Why would anyone steal from me, I’m just a little old lady all alone and poor,’ and they were empathizing with her,” rued Sarah-Lynn, a freelance videographer.
Guthrie was told to withdraw the money and deposit it using a Bitcoin ATM at a nearby bodega.
“That $25K was all she had left to save her from small problems,” Sarah-Lynn shared. “My parents lost everything in the 2008 crash and now she’s stuck in a tiny apartment, which she can barely afford with her Social Security.”
The scammers initially ensured Guthrie wouldn’t call a relative or a friend for advice by warning her that the hackers would access the phone of anyone she called.
But she ended up telling her physical therapist what had happened during an appointment the following day.
The therapist alerted Sarah-Lynn, who went to find and confront her mother.
When Sarah-Lynn told Guthrie she had been talking to criminals and not Microsoft, her mom almost refused to believe her.
“They [the scammers] are like hypnotists,” Sarah-Lynn explained. “It 100% felt like I was talking to someone in a cult.”
Sarah-Lynn noted that when she arrived, her mom was still on the phone with the scammers, “still fully invested.”
“I kept trying to mute the call and she kept pulling the phone away,” Sarah-Lynn described. “She had already given them her life savings, but in her head I just didn’t understand.”
They eventually went to the bank to speak with the branch manager — and reality finally set in.
“The thing that finally convinced her was when the branch manager of her bank told her the money was gone,” Sarah-Lynn said. “It was like something switched in her head when someone in authority told her.”
The pair filed federal and Mesa police reports, but since the money was transferred with Bitcoin, they were told that authorities were unable to track the criminals and the funds.
However, Sarah-Lynn set up a GoFundMe for her mother and was able to quickly raise more than $27,700.
“It’s incredible how quickly people came together. If it weren’t for that, my mother would be lost, and I would have to care for her,” she beamed.
Guthrie is not alone — last month a grieving British widow admitted she was conned out of $63,000 in life savings by a “romance scammer” who preyed on her via Facebook.
And a financial advice columnist for New York Magazine recently confessed that she had been scammed out of $50,000 by a con man who claimed to be a CIA agent.
