NEW YORK — It’s getting harder to trust caller ID. Scammers can now use apps to show up as a trusted number, including the number for your bank.
It’s called “spoofing,” and CBS New York investigative reporter Tim McNicholas is asking what tech companies are doing to stop it.
Through 12 years of nursing and through the horrors of a pandemic, Avalon Grimes kept going.
“And cared for patients, and held patients’ hands, and cried with patients,” Grimes said.
But on a recent rainy day, she told CBS New York how her life’s savings were washed away with one call.
“When I spoke with the police department they told me it’s something called ‘spoofing.’ They can use an app and they can mimic and number, and the number that showed up, the whole name that you would normally see when you would call Chase, that number showed up,” Grimes said.
Indeed, her T-Mobile records show the number that called her is the same international Chase number on the back of her credit card. The caller said he’d detected fraud and convinced Grimes to transfer her money to another account.