Longview woman loses $36,500 to sophisticated scam

Jo Brewer is angry and embarrassed that she missed multiple red flags, but she wants to warn others

Jo Brewer would be among the last individuals you’d think would fall for a scam, despite her age.

Yet the feisty, politically and civilly active 81-year-old retired Longview accountant and teacher lost $36,500 recently when some clever and well-prepared scammers convinced her they wanted to protect her money from fraudsters.

They convinced her to make two cash withdrawals from her Fibre Federal Credit Union checking/savings account and give the cash to two people she’d never met.

She knows the money is gone for good and she doesn’t expect to recover a cent,  though she did report the case to Longview PD.

I’ve known Jo Brewer for years. When she told me about the experience recently, she was embarrassed and angry, repeatedly asking herself how she fell for it but wanting to share her story as a warning to others.

“I have three degrees. How could I be so stupid? Their stories were so good and (they said) they were trying to protect me,” she told me over coffee at Keebler’s in downtown Longview.

“I realize now how many red flags there were.”

She’s thankful her financial adviser stopped her from withdrawing another $200,000 in retirement savings that the scammers had tried to get her to withdraw.

This is a story of code words, secrecy, fabrications and deceit so cunning that even it turned Brewer’s suspicions inward, toward her own partner.  Her investment adviser called it the most sophisticated scam he has ever encountered.

It started on Wednesday, Jan. 17, when Brewer received an email purportedly from Pay Pal. It stated that she’d been charged $799.99 to purchase bitcoin, a speculative, high-risk and discredited digital currency.

Brewer says she routinely uses Pay Pal, but “I don’t even know what bitcoin is.”

She was alarmed. So she dialed the given “Pay Pal” number and spoke briefly with ”Aaron” and then at length with another man who identified himself as Kevin Brown. Both spoke with southeast Asian accents, she said.

Over the course of several hours, “Brown”  told her that she’d been scammed and that the Federal Trade Commission was investigating. He gave Brewer an FTC agent’s badge number and a case number. 

He also told her that there was a warrant out for her arrest because the FTC wondered whether she was part of the scam. In addition, he said her Social Security number had been compromised. He emailed her a two-page letter addressed to her reputedly from the Social Security Administration advising her not to discuss the case with anyone.

“As the investigation involves many individuals and institutions you are also required to keep the confidentiality on your part,” read the letter, which is riddled with errors of grammar and syntax and misspelled her surname as Bruwer. “You cannot share any information or get involved in any conversation with anyone which may jeopardize the ongoing investigation, everyone is considered as a third party.”

According to the FBI, in 2022 there were 88,262 complaints of fraud from people age 60 and older, resulting in $3.1 billion in losses. That was 82% more than reported in 2021.

Datelined Jan. 17 from Baltimore, the letter included the name and number for a Social Security investigator said to be handling the case, Shane Marker.

Brown told Brewer that to protect her money she should withdraw it and turn it over to an “agent” who would arrive at her apartment in an hour or two. Brown said Brewer would get a check for the money later.

So the next day — Thursday Jan. 18 — Brown kept Brewer on the phone while she drove through ice and snow to the Commerce Avenue branch of Fibre Federal Credit Union. Fibre Federal was closed due to the storm, but she returned when it opened later in the day.

Brown got her on the phone again and instructed her to explain to the teller that she needed $25,000 to pay a contractor for materials and subcontractors for a home remodel project. With Brown still on he phone with her, Brewer said she told the teller the explanation. No one at the credit union raised an alarm.

About 90 minutes after the withdrawal, the ”agent” — a hooded man in this 20s — showed up at her apartment, gave Brewer the code word —“Sunday” — said nothing else and left with the cash, all in $100 bills.

“This is embarrassing. I felt threatened, not by Kevin Brown but by the ‘scammers’ ” who Brown told her were after her money, Brewer told me.

She didn’t’ even balk when Brown told her she shouldn’t speak about the case with her partner, Lehman Holder of Vancouver. In retrospect, Brewer said, Brown was trying to get her to think of others in her circle were suspect so she would not consult them. It’s a common scamming strategy.

The next day — Friday, Jan. 19 —  Brown called again and told Brewer she needed to withdraw the balance in her checking/savings account  — $10,534.14. To protect it she would need to give the cash to another “agent” who would again show up at her apartment. The same credit union teller got her the cash — while Brown again listened in by phone.

The agent, a woman who called herself  “Molly,” arrived in about 90 minutes and collected the money. Molly looked southeast Asian but did not have a foreign accent, Brewer said.

On Friday, Brown also advised Brewer that she should withdraw her retirement accounts so they could be protected. He instructed  her to tell anyone who questioned her that she was withdrawing money to help a nephew in Indiana buy a house.

Brewer does not know how Brown knew that she does, indeed, have a nephew in Indiana,  but it could have been gleaned from her Facebook page, she said.

When she called Steve Fuller, a Longview investment adviser at Financial Strategies who handles Brewer’s retirement accounts, he immediately became suspicious, especially when he heard the bogus nephew story.

Steve told me, “’Jo, I think you need to come over on Monday and talk this over.” 

That’s when the truth hit her.

 “Jo is such a sharp person. I think the thing is how well-executed (the scam) was. They had multiple layers to it and different actors participating” — Steve Fuller, investment advisor

When Lehman visited her on Saturday Brewer wrote out what was going on and took him into the bedroom to talk it over. She was paranoid that a cell phone app that Brown had asked her to load allowed him to hear her every conversation — even though she had by then stripped it from her phone.

Brewer and Lehman reported the loss to police on Monday. While they were at the police station, Brown called her again to urge her to withdraw the $200,000 from her retirement account to protect it.  

She also went to the Longview Social Security office, where she learned that the letter and report of a fraud investigation were themselves frauds. Officials advised her to put a credit freeze on her accounts, which she has done.

Brown called her seven more times that day, but Brewer said she didn’t answer.  

Fuller,  whom Brewer authorized to speak to me about her case, said red flags went up immediately.

“Knowing (Brewer) and how she conducts herself, I knew something was off immediately.  It was also the sense of urgency that something had to be done immediately, and when I asked follow-up questions, she could not answer. That was another red flag.”

Fuller is surprised that Brewer, who still does accounting work for her church, fell for the scheme.

 “She is such a sharp person. I think the thing is how well-executed (the scam) was. They had multiple layers to it and different actors participating.”

Telling senior citizens that their Social Security has been compromised “cuts deep with seniors. It’s a big portion of their monthly income. I think that is where she got sucked into this scenario.”

Brewer should have checked with the Social Security Administration directly herself rather than taking someone’s word, he said.

In addition, any demand for cash is a dead giveaway of a scam, Fuller said. And  people should avoid making calls or clicking on links from people alleging scams. 

He called the scam the “worst I’ve ever seen or heard about. It was like a case study I would have had in a compliance seminar. It almost seemed unreal.”

Fuller said he is surprised that Fibre Federal did not try to intervene when Brewer made the two large withdraws.

Shelly Buller, the credit union’s chief operating officer, defended the teller, saying that Brewer gave her a plausible explanation for needing the money and that Brewer is an alert and competent client. (Brewer authorized credit union officials to speak with me.)

The credit union has a threshold at which a manager automatically is brought in to review a large withdrawal request, but Buller declined to reveal it for security purposes.

She and Heather Snyder, AVP of marketing and community development, said the credit union constantly reviews the ever-evolving nature of scams and adjusts its policies and procedures accordingly. It also issues red alerts when a new scam makes the rounds.

It’s a constant struggle, they said, because scams are a “daily occurrence.”

Brewer is grateful to Fuller, her investment counselor, for stopping her before she lost even more.

“He told me, ‘Jo. This does not sound like you. I know you know better than this. You would not have taken $200,000 out knowing that it was taxable.”

The loss hurt, but she should be financially secure for the rest of her life, Brewer said.

Longview police declined to comment on the case because it is a pending investigation.

At least some of the people who scammed Brewer obviously are operating close by, probably from Portland, Fuller and Brewer surmise. Phone numbers used by Brown have area codes for Wisconsin and Alabama, but that doesn’t mean anything these days, Fuller said.

Brewer said her Facebook account was frozen a week or so before the “Pay Pal” scam, and she wonders if the two are linked. A Longview police computer specialist who is a friend of hers found evidence of tampering from individuals in Indonesia, Portland, Philadelphia and Arizona, Brewer said.

Opinions vary on whether senior citizens are more vulnerable to scammers, but there is no doubt that more are getting targeted.

According to the FBI, in 2022 there were 88,262 complaints of fraud from people age 60 and older, resulting in $3.1 billion in losses. That was 82% more than reported in 2021.

The most common financial scams that target older people include government impersonation scams, sweepstakes scams, and robocall scams, according to the National Council on Aging. Low income and uneducated adults are considered especially susceptible.

But that does not describe Brewer.

“If this could happen to Jo Brewer, this could happen to anyone,” she said. “My goal is to not let it to happen to anyone else.”

And, she adds in a smug and defiant way, she had withdrawn money from her savings account to pay for a new car just a week or so before the scammers struck.

“That’s $45,000 they didn’t get.”