You don’t have to be a Pulitzer Prize winning playwright to be a victim of identity theft, but there is clearly no immunity for brilliant writers either.
Educated at Brown University and the Yale School of Drama, Pulitzer winner Lynn Nottage was awakened in the early morning hours, to a flurry of alarming phone calls from concerned family and friends.
According to a report in the Brooklyn Eagle:
“Less than an hour before the call, someone hacked into Nottage’s three e-mail and Facebook accounts, sending out a cry for help after allegedly being mugged in a United Kingdom park. The e-mail blast, which said Nottage was writing “with tears in my eyes,” went out to every listserv she was on, totaling thousands of people, Nottage estimated.
This story resonates with me because our family got similar calls this past summer, from someone claiming that our son had been involved in an accident in Europe. The caller pleaded for money to be wired via Western Union.
Because our son had been to Europe just weeks earlier with a concert choir, our family members called us to make sure he was okay. One particularly loving (but vulnerable) family member actually withdrew a very large sum of cash to wire overseas and thankfully called us prior to sending the money.
Commonly known as the “grandparents scam”, predators depend on friends and family (often grandpa and grandma) to take the bait and send the money immediately. Sadly, many do just that.
One of the more unsettling questions in our family’s case was how did these well organized criminals obtain details about our son’s travels, as well as his contact information back at home. Scary question eh?
In another case reported by consumeraffairs.com:
The con man who convinced Edward and Irene Kellerman of Fairlawn, Ohio, that he was their beloved grandson Brian is still on the run. They wired him $3,000.
“It was the perfect set up and these people knew exactly what they were doing,” says Edward Kellerman.
The detective on the Kellerman case, Dave Zampelli, was able to track the con to Canada where he retrieved the wire transfer records and a fake id with Brian Kellerman’s name on it.
“They’re very organized. They know what they’re doing. They’re cons. They’re smooth talkers and daily they ‘re persuading victims to wire them money,” Zampelli said.
Are you curious to know which of your friends and loved ones would actually help you in your time of need? This is not the way to find out.
