You Won the Lottery! Beware of Phone Scams

April 17, 2008 by Chinatown Blogger.

On the day taxes were due, the Chinatown Blogger received this email from the office of City Councilor Sam Yoon. Below is a copy of the the email I received about a phone scam that has been targeting Chinese residents in Boston.

“Dear Community leader,
Councilor Yoon wanted to alert you to a fraud that is targeting elderly, non English speaking Chinese residents in Boston. This happened to the mother of a friend of the Councilor’s. The people running this phone scam are very aggressive and convincing. They tell the victim that they “won the lottery” and the victim should send a check to them for processing fees and they will deposit the winnings in their bank account, so could you please give us the account number, and etc. They did get the social security number of the victim. Fortunately I don’t think she gave them a bank account number.

Sam wants to try and do more to put out the word in the Chinese community about this. We will probably reach out to various Chinese social service providers and community groups and Elder Affairs and etc. I was wondering if you have run into this before, if you have a sense of how prevalent this is, if you have some safety tips that we could circulate and maybe what more we could do about prevention.

I am pasting in a copy of the daughter’s earlier email describing how the group operated. I did a check of the phone number that they gave her mother, and it is in Hong Kong. Thanks for your help. – Richard.

Richard Giordano
Aide to At-Large Councilor Sam Yoon
Boston City Hall, 5th floor, Boston, MA 02201

Please forward this to your friends, yahoo group etc, but most importantly call your parents/grandparents about this. I didn’t think it would happen in Chinese, but it did. It’s a SSN scam that has now moved to the east coast. A three person Mandarin speaking team(supposedly based in Hong Kong) has been contacting my mother last week about this promotional vacation meeting she should go to. She didn’t attend. They contacted her again in this week and chatted with her for a bit all under the guise of getting her birthdate, social security number, and other personal information. They told her she won their lottery, and she needs to provide her SSN so the money can be sent. Then they ask her for checking account number(she didn’t give them that).

Well, she gave away all the information, but thank goodness she didn’t go to the meeting else she could have been coerced on the spot to give them access to her checking account. Once they have access they will clear it all out. Now the disturbing part is this was very popular in San Francisco up until the public started warning the community through newspapers, radio, TV etc. I’m starting a one woman PR campaign to get the word out. I extremely upset this happened to my mom, AND I want to make sure this doesn’t happen to anyone else. I want to let the community know so no one else will be caught, and these con artists can move their operation out of the state. They are targeting unsuspecting non-English speaking Chinese elders, who probably don’t know what to do when fraud is committed. Well, they messed with the wrong victim!”

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