Alert! Beware of bogus Social Security Letters

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Identify the Scam

If you receive a call, text, email, letter, or message on social media that:

  • Threatens to suspend your Social Security number, even if they have part or all of your Social Security number
  • Warns of arrest or legal action
  • Demands or requests immediate payment
  • Requires payment by gift card, prepaid debit card, Internet currency, or by mailing cash
  • Pressures you for personal information
  • Requests secrecy
  • Threatens to seize your bank account
  • Promises to increase your Social Security benefit
  • Tries to gain your trust by providing fake “documentation,” false “evidence,” or the name of a real government official

It is a SCAM!

Here’s the Official webpage for this notification:

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Can’t believe I’m just seeing this now…but then I’ve been more a stranger than usual as the summer has been busy.

My mother got caught up in something like that. She’s actually normally really good with computers and staying away from sketchy emails…

However she was waiting for an email from Social Security regarding that whole thing where retired school system employees who had separate retirement programs though those government systems didn’t get social security benefits and now they do. As usual social security like all government red tape was being maddeningly contradictory and slow to respond.

She must have clicked on something sketchy and apparently a program was installed on her computer(not a virus so normal antivirus programs didn’t detect it!) that allowed scammers to watch everything she did on her screen. Fairly quickly random Zelle accounts were being attached to her bank accounts and money sent off to scammers. I helped her get everything bank and credit wise locked down fairly quick and told her to just unplug the computer. Thankfully the banks restored the funds (several thousand had be stolen).

I bought her a new computer and drove up to Ohio staying up there a couple weeks mid July to early August to set everything up and playing handyman. I took the old computer home and will likely manically enjoy cutting up the hard drive into pieces with an angle grinder, replace that, and install a new copy of windows.

I brought up the movie The Beekeeper for us to watch. Seemed appropriate.

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