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Feb. 22, 2021 - Epoch Times
29:19
How Scammers Steal Thousands from California Residents | Steve Wagstaffe
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We want to talk to you about scams that are going across the California, especially after this pandemic or during the pandemic.
They're pretty good.
I mean, you have to say to these people, they're very smooth when they talk.
You know, there's that movie out there, the Leonardo DiCaprio movie of, you know, the Wolf of Wall Street.
And that's what they were doing scam.
And that was a true story because they're smooth.
And the other aspect these scam artists have They're willing to be hung up on 99 times if they can only get one victim out of those calls because it's productive.
Then it's very financially productive for them.
And do they target a certain age of people, a certain demographic of people?
They are particularly interested in the elderly.
The elderly are very susceptible to this scam and all scams.
We know that.
But not always, because there's another group of people who can be easily, I guess, fished in, and that is people looking for a good investment, a good, quick buy.
They're looking for the victim.
They're not looking for the smart person who's going to keep asking questions.
So it's really important that you always think smart.
I don't want you to be in the position, any citizen, to be in a position of being scared to go out.
I don't want to instill fear in anybody.
Because no matter what, we're still a safe society.
We are not what some communities around the world face.
But we need to be smart.
Scammers are targeting Californians in an attempt to steal money and personal information, especially senior citizens.
My guest today is Steve Wagstaff.
He's the District Attorney of San Mateo County.
Today he discusses the scams across the state and how to avoid them.
Welcome to California Insider.
Steve, it's great to have you on.
Welcome.
Thank you for letting me join you today.
We want to talk to you about scams that are going across the California, especially after this pandemic or during the pandemic.
And, you know, when it comes to scams and fraud, the first one that comes into mind that everybody should know about is the EDD scandal.
Can you tell us more about it?
Your county was the one that uncovered this fraud.
Yeah, it was here in my county was where we first discovered that this fraud was going on.
And it got discovered by accident.
And some good work by one of my inspectors.
What occurred is the first week of January, January 1st or 2nd, somewhere in that arena, my inspector was listening to jail phone calls.
Every jail phone call is recorded, and he was working on a case and listening to phone calls.
And certainly, he suddenly heard a jail inmate talking about this scam that was being done.
Was it in July or January?
July.
July.
First week of July 2020.
I'm sorry if I said January.
First week of July 2020.
He heard this scam.
Now, some detectives might have just said, this has nothing to do with my case.
I'm moving on to the next call.
But not Inspector Boyd of my office.
He instead listened.
He has a great curiosity.
And this occasion, it worked to the benefit of the community because he kept listening.
And that's what started.
Just that he learned about the scam, started an investigation, working with our sheriff's office here in San Mateo County Jail to run it down.
And what he found is, wait, this wasn't just one person.
What he found was that there were a couple dozen people pulling off this scam in our county jail, and that it was so easy to do to get free money.
You know, to deal with EDD, submit an application for unemployment benefits.
This is pandemic related because it had to do with all the money, the stimulus money coming out of the federal government that was being then siphoned through the California Employment Development Agency.
And all you had to do is put in an application.
Find a bank account because the state was working with Bank America.
Have an account set up where they could do a direct deposit and then go get the money out of the account.
They wouldn't send the money to the jail, but to do that.
And my inspector found that out and found out that we had a bunch of people in our jail doing it.
He then did search warrants, because what they did is they wanted to follow the money, find out where it was being spent, and he did a great job on following up on that.
We found one person in particular who had gotten out of jail, went, got the money out of that account, and took a very expensive trip to Las Vegas, where he spent over $5,000 in some very hoity-toity clothing store down there, including some very expensive tennis shoes.
We did a search warrant on that defendant's home, and they found some of the material, but what Jordan really wanted, being the detective he is, is he wanted those shoes.
Well, we never got the fancy shoes back anymore.
I think they made Air Jordans look like cheap shoes, apparently.
So we did that.
We found what we had, but it didn't stop there.
We realized if it's happening in our jail, it's happening in every jail in the state, and it's probably happening in In all the state prison facilities.
And that's because people get transferred so often between them, and it's so easy to just say, hey, here's a real easy scam.
Now, what we were looking at, I should clarify that for you, what we were looking for is purely what was being done in incarceration facilities, prisons and jails.
And that's where our cases all came from, our jails.
But we did notify it, and we did check, and we found that we didn't have any other agency, state prison, the Department of Corrections, any other county jail that had encountered it yet.
So it really was.
My inspectors bureau and Inspector Jordan were the ones who broke this, and we found that it was some easy money and for some pretty expensive, just here in our county.
Just here in our county where we have prosecuted so far 23 individuals for committing this crime, we believe the amount of stolen money from EDD, from the state taxpayer dollars, we feel just in our little county that it's between a quarter million and half a million dollars.
That was taken in a very short time period.
Remember, this is all pandemic related.
So for us, it's from when they started to put that money out in springtime till they finally got it stopped in the autumn, around the August, September.
So it was a short time period and a big loss.
And they were doing it in other counties as well, right?
Do you know why the number keeps going up?
Well, the first person I interviewed was saying it was a billion.
Then it went to 11 billion.
Now it's a 31 billion.
And their estimates are just going up and up.
The number that I continue to hear, and maybe as time goes on, it'll be more when it relates for the whole state, which is in the area of upwards of 2 billion.
And I've seen those same other numbers, you know, the 10 billion, the 20 billion.
I believe that's what they believe is the entire EDD fraud.
Because remember, what we're talking about, what I'm referring to, is fraud, EDD fraud committed by people incarcerated, basically, who are not working, who have no right to the money in any fashion.
I think the big numbers, and I think that's the number I most often has heard, is the 1.5 to 2 billion.
I think the additional numbers from what I have read and heard relates to the rest of the people out there.
Because remember, The average crook on the streets, the average scam artist on the street can put in an application too under a phony name using and get money there and not having anything to do with an incarceration facility.
Now, how they have estimated, how EDD is estimated that that secondary number from outside is that I don't know, but that is the additional number I've heard from them.
But here in the incarcerated facilities, we know it was happening in county jails.
I know the second county to file charges On any of these cases anywhere was up in Lassen County, little tiny Lassen County, because they found it in their jail way up north there.
And we know it hit state prison on a wide level.
We know that it was, for instance, the information I was given is that there were at least a dozen people on death row who did the scam, or at least their names were used.
We know at least their names were used.
Scott Peterson's name was supposedly used, I was told.
And it is about whether he actually did.
I haven't heard from the Department of Corrections as they did their investigations, whether that's true.
But we know it was rampant everywhere.
And what about now?
There's other sorts of scams that are going on that you have seen related to the pandemic.
Can you tell us more about these?
Yeah, there's actually several of them.
You're right.
And every one of them, as all scams are, it's really offensive and really taking advantage of people.
And this is people, again, these are just people on the outside.
Early on, at the beginning, when you go back to March and April of last year, I know the first scams that were being seen throughout California involved where people were calling up, and this is long before we ever had a vaccine, but people were calling.
I remember they would call up and they would say, looking for investors, they would call somebody up and say, listen, I've got a great opportunity for you.
If you provide money to me to invest in this company, this company is going to have the very first vaccine, and we are going to make billions of dollars on this, and you're going to make so much more if you can just contribute $25,000, $50,000, $100,000 as an investor, and it was a total scam.
It had nothing to do with it.
I know that the FBI and the United States Attorney's Office down in San Diego arrested a couple people for doing that exact scam successfully.
They got a lot of people.
When at that point, back in March and April, there wasn't even, at that point, they were just starting to hope they could come up with a vaccine.
There was no company that had the leader on it, and it certainly never panned out.
It was just a scam.
And we knew that was going on in multiple places with people.
They're pretty good.
I mean, you have to say to these people, they're very smooth when they talk.
You know, there's that movie out there, the Leonard DiCaprio movie of, you know, the Wolf of Wall Street.
And that's what they were doing scam offering.
That was a true story, because they're smooth.
And the other aspect these scam artists have, they're willing to be hung up on 99 times if they can only get one victim out of those calls, because it's productive.
Then it's very financially productive for them.
And they were doing this over the phone.
They were getting the $15,000, $20,000, $30,000, $100,000 from a phone conversation.
Phone and internet.
Phone and internet.
No meetings.
No face-to-face meetings.
People were turning money over.
And again, I don't work in business.
I don't know how it works in the business world.
But the thought that around here, if I was going to be spending that much money, I'd be doing some background checks before I turn my money over to another person.
That was the first one we saw.
Then we, and we put out bullet here in my office, we put out consumer alerts telling our consumers, be cautious, watch out for anybody trying to get the money from you for that type of a thing.
You know, we had a more, what's the more recent one?
Now that we finally have a vaccine, Now what the scams that are going around, I know the county to my south in San Jose, Santa Clara County, they've had a bunch.
We've had a couple instances of it, nobody caught on it, but where people were being sold advanced appointments to get the vaccine.
So somebody's thinking, you know what, they're a young man like you, and they're thinking, you know, at the rate I'm going to get it, if I just wait the normal course, I won't get it until July or August.
But this guy's saying if I send him 50 or 100 bucks, here's an appointment, and I can go to the vaccination center and I'll get it.
And it's total fraud.
We had here in our county last week, I know we had at least two, it may have been more, but at least two people who showed up at our vaccination center in San Mateo County who did not have, they didn't have an appointment, it was totally faffed.
And all the scammer had to do was say, hey, look at San Mateo.
You can see it in the news.
They're doing it at the San Mateo County Event Center.
They're doing it by appointments on these days.
And so all I have to do is say, here it is, and do it.
Now, that's not big money.
That was being done small money.
But you know what?
Those are the types of scams that we've been seeing throughout this pandemic is loads of things like that.
And do they target a certain age of people, a certain demographic of people?
And how do they work?
Well, you know, they'll take anybody they can get on the phone.
But if they have any insight into it, if they just dial a number and pull somebody up, they are particularly interested in the elderly.
The elderly are very susceptible to this scam and all scams.
We know that.
And I'm not speaking ill of another age segment, because you can tell by looking at me, I qualify as elderly.
But they really do.
They really do focus on people who are 60, 70, 80, and 90.
And they are very vulnerable because they are, unfortunately, are elderly.
I won't say unfortunately.
It's a good personality trait, but it makes them vulnerable.
They're very trusting.
They can fall for so many of the scams.
And indeed, on some of these pandemic scams, when we get the calls of people doing it, it's often elderly.
But not always.
Because there's another group of people who can be easily, I guess, fished in, and that is people looking for a good investment, a good quick buck.
You know, everybody wants to say, you know what, can I quadruple my money overnight, type of a thing.
And so you get that call from this very smooth talking guy or smooth talking woman.
And they say, oh, I've got this for you.
Yeah.
And, you know, because I know in Santa Clara County, I read of a case down there where a woman, not on the pandemic, but another one, just this past autumn, was ripped off for $300,000 that she lost.
They'll never get it back.
They'll never find the person that did it.
But it was on the offer of participating in this great new startup.
And you can be there.
And you're going to be a billionaire before it's done.
Well, that's attractive to a lot of people.
And something like that, the person gave him $300,000 over the phone, or was it in person meeting?
That one, as I read the story, was done through multiple phone contacts, never in person.
Is that something you recommend for people that are looking to do investments to actually meet in person?
Number one for me is you've got to know who you're dealing with.
Do not deal.
Don't take them at their word.
You do some background.
They're calling from phones and you say to them, you ask them, give me a number you're calling from.
Let me know where I'm going to call back to.
And you can have that.
That can be checked out.
You can check.
You know, there is the Federal Trade Commission.
The United States Federal Trade Commission has a wonderful website dealing with all the various types of scams and things to look out for.
It's really well done.
I've gone to it multiple times to see, hey, is this latest thing I heard of, is that something that's going on around the country?
And I urge people to take a look at that.
Ask for that.
Don't do things over the phone.
Realistically, get in writing.
If you say to that person calling, well, that's interesting.
Why don't you send to me all your written documentation?
Scammers don't want to do that.
They don't want to leave any clue that law enforcement can trace them.
That's their goal.
Law enforcement does not trace them.
And so if you can, you just ask the questions like that.
It's sort of like, again, not pandemic scam, but the scam on the IRS scam.
That worked very well for a while.
I think it's sort of known, you know, Saturday Night Live put it on its skid a few times so people began to get it.
But that thing of the IRS calling, you're behind on your taxes and we're going to levy on your house if you don't quickly send a check to this address.
Yeah, I got some of those calls and I got scared in the first few of them.
There's a lawsuit filed against you.
And what we know is the IRS, they never call.
California, you know, state franchise tax, they never call like that.
That never happens type of a thing.
It's made up.
But people, you know, I don't expect people to be necessarily sophisticated in this.
And again, these scammers, they'll make 500 calls.
All they need to do is hit one, and they've made their day pay type of a thing.
So it's really asking questions, asking for documentation, asking for, tell me where I can go on the website to see your company.
Show me that.
Just don't tell me it.
Show it to me.
And what you're going to get very quickly, I hang up.
It's going to happen very quickly because they're looking for the victim.
They're not looking for the smart person who's going to keep asking questions.
If you go back 20 years, because I've been in this business for over 40 years, 20, 25 years, 30 years, you know what the scams were then?
Because obviously they weren't happening over the internet.
Where our scams then were people walking around saying, let me put a new roof on your house.
We had so many people fall for that one in particular.
Let me put a roof on your house, and you know what?
I need you to put, give me $6,000 for it.
And they would then, basically, if they didn't just disappear and never to be seen again, you would simply, they would put a tar and paper thing that cost them about $300.
And what we did there, we did a lot of community outreach, just as you and I are doing today, to try and say, hey, you know what?
Get a contract.
You have a right to demand a contract.
You have three-day rescission and all those rules.
California has passed a lot of good laws for people to demand things from these vendors.
But today it's become far more sophisticated, far more, you know, It really leads to some serious victimology of our elderly, but all people in there.
I think there's probably some people who've been ripped off pretty good who don't want to say it because they're embarrassed.
The elderly will tell us, but often the elderly won't.
Sometimes these reports come to us from their children when they say, you know, they'll say, Mom, Dad, what's this check that you wrote for $10,000 to this company?
And then it's the daughter or son who will tell us that about what's going on.
Can you give us some of the examples of how the elderly, how the scams target the elderly people?
Yeah.
For the elderly, it can be on the phone, but it can be in person.
Quite often, it can be the person knocking on the door.
It could be on the phone.
Not as much the internet with the elderly.
Some, but not as much.
They target as much.
But it'll be the in-person type of a thing.
And it'll be anywhere.
A perfect example of a case that we did prosecute was an elderly gentleman who simply went out for a walk and he was sitting at a park bench.
And these couple of women and a man came up to them and they, again, they're slick talkers.
And they talked out, they were very friendly, elderly guy.
His wife had died just like a year earlier, lonely, looking for, these people seem very nice.
And they talked to him about, hey, we really are sort of, we need some assistance.
What we need is if you could just give us $9,000.
If you go down to the bank and give us $9,000, we will be able to give it right back to you.
We'll be able to give you a right back plus more within that.
And he went down, he took out the $9,000, he gave it to him, it was done.
Gone.
Never seen.
But we caught those people.
We didn't get the money, but we caught those people because they were working the Bay Area, that type of thing.
Is there a reason for the $9,000?
Yes.
Is that a reason?
Good question.
If it's over $10,000, the bank or the loan institution is required To obtain information and provide that, over $10,000 in those circumstances.
I should mention that, that's a great point, that our financial institutions here in San Mateo County, and I bet elsewhere, they've been wonderful.
We do training with them.
My office, my elder abuse unit, does regular training with all the financial officers.
We want our tellers to know if they see an elderly person coming in, And asking for a big sum of money like that, they'll engage them in conversation.
They'll try to find out what they'll report.
We've had a lot of reports to us that have stopped scams from occurring because the bank people, we do the same with real estate agents.
Anybody who's having contact with them, we really try to educate them on the scams so they can help be great citizens in reporting it to us in law enforcement type of a thing.
You also know some other scams that target the elderly.
I'll give you an example is the one that I'm sure you heard about.
It's been very popular.
I had it happen to me two Fridays ago.
And that was the call comes in.
It's a young man or a young woman.
This one was a young man who talked to me.
I said, who is this?
He said, Grandpa, this is your grandson.
He doesn't know he's talking to the District Attorney of San Mateo County.
This is your grandson.
And I said, really?
Since I only have four very small granddaughters, I knew it was a fraud, but I kept it going.
And I said to him, hey, what's up?
I need some money really bad.
I'm in trouble, Grandpa, and all that.
And I said, great, stay on the line for a little bit.
We're tracing you, you scam artist.
And I immediately got the hang of it.
But that is a very common one.
We have unfortunately had numerous elderly people Suffer that one.
Fall prey to that one.
The call on that one.
Oh, sure.
And they'll do the thing that scammers love.
They'll say, this is your grandson.
And then the unsuspecting grandparent, grandmother or grandparent will say, oh, is that you, Jack?
And then the person goes, yeah, it's me.
They'll pick right up and roll with it.
I mean, they're good at what they do.
It's just it's criminal and it's despicable, but they are good at it.
So what about, now that we have you on, what about the crime?
Do you see any patterns on crime at this stage that we are in the pandemic and after the pandemic?
The crime has taken some interesting paths over the last almost a year now.
It has taken some interesting paths.
Some of them are very predictable and logical.
An example would be that our domestic violence here in San Mateo County increased 30%.
I mean, it really went up.
And I guess there's some logic to that.
People are in stay at home.
They're not getting out all day, coming home at night, things like that.
And for whatever reason, and I should mention, it's not a particular demographic.
It is not a certain age group.
It's not a certain population.
Wealth group.
It's not a certain gender or ethnicity.
It's sort of across the board on those cases.
So that, in a sense, is predictable.
I mean, for that, I want to say to people, hey, there's no law that says you have to stay indoors.
You just have to stay away from work.
Go take a walk if you have a stress.
The other thing that we've seen go down has been home burglaries.
And again, that, you know, most of our home burglaries, and we have a lot in San Mateo County, most of those were occurring in the daytime.
Well, now people are at home during the course of that, and so that went down.
Our residential burglaries went down.
For a long stretch, whenever the, depends when we were in the purple or the deep purple phase, And our malls were closed.
All our stores were closed.
Theft, identity theft, things like that.
That went down because there wasn't that availability to go in and steal at that.
Now that we're beginning to open up again, I'm assuming those will come back.
I'm hopeful that domestic violence will go down again, and I'm hopeful the home burglaries will stay down.
An interesting thing occurred, and I'm not sure it can be attributed to the pandemic or what.
It would take a good Stanford sociologist to do a good study on it.
And that is, over the course of the last year, and this isn't just San Mateo County.
It is true in our county, but it's true everywhere.
And that is violent crime has gone up.
And I'm not sure what's happening, why that's occurring on that line.
It's just simply a fact that I know, that violent crime.
Here in San Mateo County in 2018 and 2019, we're a very safe county.
We have three quarters of a million people as our population, but we had homicides of about six, six, and eight or ten for the prior three years.
In 2020, our pandemic year, we had almost 20, just under 20.
It was like 18, 17 or 18 of them.
And that's a big increase.
That's more than a double increase there.
It's not just us.
I know San Francisco's homicide rate is up dramatically.
I know that Alameda County, Oakland, their crime rate.
I was talking to their police chief several weeks ago, and she was telling me that, yeah, the shootings have just gone up immeasurably, that the homicides have gone up almost 40%.
I think they had had, in January of last year, they had had, I don't know, six or eight.
And this year they were, for January, almost at 20.
It had really exploded on them, but the shootings had gone up.
They had like 55 shootings in Oakland in January.
And that's very worrisome, because theft is one level of concern, of course, that we do care about.
But homicide, shootings, violence to people, that's real scary.
And so that's something I know.
I had a meeting with my police chiefs.
We're really paying attention to, say, what do we do?
What do we need to do?
Do some smart policing there to find out where they're occurring.
We've had two homicides here in San Mateo County in January, and that's unusual.
That's not a good case we want.
Is there a root cause for this?
Have you seen any patterns in it yet, reasons behind it?
You know, that good question, because you wonder, is this just an increase in gang crime?
Is it an increase in that?
And the answer was no.
Our homicides over the last year have been really varied.
We had three of them were, three of those were domestic violence, murder, suicide.
All three were the male killing his partner or spouse and then killing himself.
So that was three of those, but that's only three of that group.
It was really broken up.
There were some gang.
There were some just random anger killings type of a thing.
So it really varied on that line.
So I did not see a pattern as to a particular type of homicide.
Other than what we didn't have is we did not have any serial or multiple murderers.
Like we have had at times in the past.
It's been single incident murders.
Now, Steve, do you have any other thoughts for our audience?
You know, what we're talking about today is avoiding becoming a victim.
That's my principal goal for you.
You know, what I want to have, you know, my office is surrounded with pictures of victims of cases I've prosecuted over the years to remind me of what happens to poor innocent people and their families.
On that line.
So it's really important that you always think smart.
I don't want you to be in the position, any citizen, to be in a position of being scared to go out.
I don't want to instill fear in anybody.
Because no matter what, we're still a safe society.
We are not what some communities around the world face.
But we need to be smart.
You can't sit there and be naive and think, you know what, at five in the morning, I can take my dog out for a walk and not worry at all.
You have to be alert.
You know what we have constantly is ATM. We still run into ATM crimes, where people go to the ATM, they're not paying attention to what's around them, and suddenly they've got somebody with a gun at their back saying, Take out 500 bucks.
I want the money.
It's being smart of your surroundings in the time of day.
The same thing every one of us, our mother and father taught us how to be careful as a child.
Don't lose that safety lessons that they gave.
And when people are calling you, when people call and they say, and they've got a great deal for you.
I can pretty much guarantee it ain't a great deal.
It's going to be somebody hoping to take money out of your pocketbook and turn it into their own.
It is that they are there.
Unfortunately, we have a world that's always been true.
And I've always said this, as long as there are relationships and there is greed in our world, and that will be forever, There will always be a job for police and district attorneys.
There will be work for us to do.
But the big thing to do is to be smart.
Do it and don't be a victim.
Don't come in and have to meet me or my fellow prosecutors because you're a victim and we're going to court on it.
We want everybody to be smart.
And the bottom line to it is the old line, which I believe.
There's no such thing as a free lunch.
So when somebody's offering you a free lunch, say, no, thank you.
I'll eat my brown bag lunch.
Thank you so much, Stevie.
It was a pleasure to have you on.
Thank you so much.
I've always enjoyed it.
Thank you for letting me get this message out, because it is important.
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