Financial advice columnist falls for $50,000 scam

New York magazine’s The Cut has provided us with an early contender for the most embarrassing story of 2024. In a (far too) honest piece, columnist Charlotte Cowles explains how she was scammed out of $50,000 by handing over the money in a shoebox to a criminal masquerading as a government employee through a car window. The best (or worst) part? Cowles is the magazine’s financial advice columnist. Snippet below:

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. Did I know anything about this? “No,” I said…My head swam. 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. “I’m in deep shit,” I texted my husband. “My identity was stolen and it seems really bad.” — Charlotte Cowles

“Everyone who thinks they’re too smart, too financially aware, too tech-savvy to have this happen to them is wrong,” she tweeted. Maybe Michael Gove was right when he said we’d had enough of the experts.

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