Prominent financial advice columnist admits to falling for $50,000 shoe box scam

“He told me my home was being watched, my laptop had been hacked, and we were in imminent danger.”

That’s the scenario that played out this past October for Charlotte Cowles, a financial advice columnist for The Cut, a lifestyle and women’s interest publication underneath the umbrella of New York Magazine.

Since 2016, Cowles has written a regular column for the site called “My Two Cents,” in which she responded to reader questions about personal finance, saving money, creating budgets and, among other topics, avoiding scams.

But last year on Halloween, Cowles found herself on the other end of the exchange, her seeming expertise not preventing her from falling victim to a complex scheme that resulted in her giving a scammer much of her life’s savings.

She wrote about the experience in an article for The Cut, detailing the many missed signs and red flags she ignored en route to giving a stranger a shoe box filled with $50,000 in cash.

It started with a call from someone claiming to be from Amazon.

“A polite woman with a vague accent told me she was calling from Amazon customer service to check some unusual activity on my account,” Cowles writes, saying that Caller ID backed up her claim.

The “Amazon” rep asked her if she had recently purchased $8,000 worth of Apple products. Cowles hadn’t, and she even checked her recent orders to confirm as much. The woman on the other end of the line, who Cowles said identified herself as “Krista,” told her that Amazon had a record of two accounts, one personal and one a business account.

Cowles said she didn’t have a business account.

The columnist, with Krista’s support, determined that it had to have been fraud on her account, which was apparently a massive problem at the world’s top online retailer.

“It had become so pervasive that the company was working with a liaison at the Federal Trade Commission and was referring defrauded customers to him,” Cowles wrote.

Krista asked if she could connect them, which Cowles said was OK.

She was then connected to a man who identified himself as Calvin Mitchell, who claimed to be an investigator with the FTC. He provided her a badge number, gave her a call-back number and even claimed that the phone call was being recorded.

He knew the last four digits of her Social Security Number, her home address and her date of birth, Cowles said.

“I’m glad we’re speaking,” he told her, because she was embroiled in a serious international crime.

“He told me that 22 bank accounts, nine vehicles, and four properties were registered to my name. The bank accounts had wired more than $3 million overseas, mostly to Jamaica and Iraq,” the article details. He then sent her an image of a woman’s ID, which he said was found near the Mexico border in a car rented under her name with blood and drugs in the trunk.

The man then told her she was being charged with cybercrimes, drug trafficking and money laundering in both Maryland and Texas.

“I Googled my name along with ‘warrant’ and ‘money laundering,’ but nothing came up. Were arrest warrants public? I wasn’t sure. Google led me to truthfinder.com, which asked for my credit-card information — nope,” she wrote.

The stranger on the other end of the line told her not to tell a soul about their conversation, not even her friends or family. “Everyone around you is a suspect,” he said.

She told the man about how much money she had in her savings and checking account. As a freelance journalist, Cowles said she kept a health emergency fund.

Things progressed from there.

Calvin transferred her to his “colleague at the CIA,” and wished her good luck.

“The next man who got on the line had a deeper voice and a slight British accent flecked with something I couldn’t identify,” she wrote. His name was Michael Sarano, at least, that’s what he claimed.

Again, the person on the line told her not to tell anyone about their conversation, including her husband. “You are being investigated for major federal crimes … By keeping your husband out of this, you are protecting him,” he apparently said.

Michael warned her not to contact a lawyer, because then she would be deemed “noncooperative,” threatening that her home would be raided by authorities. Her brother and her best friend are both lawyers, she said, yet she was too afraid to contact either of them.

He warned her that her assets would likely be frozen and she would need to survive using cash for upwards of a…