Her bank tried... She lives across the country from me and I flew to see her to help put her life back together. It was very involved: pretty much had to reconstruct her entire digital life. New phone numbers, e-mail addresses, online accounts, passwords, all banking, credit cards, recurring payments, bill pay - EVERYTHING. My concern was now that they had a fish on the hook where the scam worked once, they'd (of course) come back with a new angle.

As part of that we went to the branch where she made these cash withdrawals. I had the opportunity to speak with the teller that was there both days. The teller's story (and I believe her) was that she was extremely suspicious of the overall situation and had an extended conversation with my mom about how unusual this was, often used for scams, etc. However, back to my original point the scammers were well ahead of this...

My mom banks with Wells Fargo. Once the scammers discovered that they were able to capitalize on the news story from years back with the Wells Fargo fake accounts/fraud scandal. They even sent her links to news stories about it.

They were able to convince my mom that her money wasn't safe at Wells Fargo because the government was investigating another Wells Fargo scam and that all of their employees are in on it. They had another scammer in the org impersonate someone from the Federal Trade Commission (ridiculous) who was supposedly investigating this.

They prepared my mom with a robust script to dance around the teller's questions and skepticism that the cash she was withdrawing was for legitimate purposes. In this case the script was something about my mom doing construction on her home and paying laborers, contractors, etc in cash.

The entirety of the scam is wild. Once they got remote access from the phishing e-mail they got opened up Windows Command Prompt and pasted in a bunch of echo statements with stuff like "Child pornography detected" and a bunch of other ridiculous stuff. However - let's remember that thanks to Hollywood any terminal interface looks scary and sophisticated to the general population (every movie ever "hacking" with CLI gibberish).

They had her convinced she was being watched/followed, investigated for CP, her phones were tapped, etc, etc, etc. She was so freaked out she didn't know if she was going to be killed or go to jail.

My sister happened to try to reach her and my mom called her back from a friends phone. Was sister somehow stumbled on this and of course knew it was a scam. My mom didn't believe her. Needless to say I have a lot of credibility in my family on this stuff (given what I do) so thankfully my sister was able to get my mom to call me.

At the beginning of the call I was able to say to my mom "This is a scam. Let me guess: they did X, then did Y, told you Z, something with cryptocurrency, etc, etc". Only when I more-or-less nailed/predicted most of the details before my mom could even tell me her story did she realize that this was, in fact, a scam.

It made me realize something: when we were growing up a saying was "talk to your kids about drugs". There needs to be an equivalent campaign for these scams. Like many here I follow this kind of stuff pretty closely but only thought of it as a curiosity because they're so ridiculous (to me/us). It never occurred to me that I should be regularly updating less sophisticated friends and family members on the scams du jour.

HN Community: Talk to your friends and family about scams.