An Oceanside senior Marine veteran was scammed out nearly $35,000 dollars through an elaborate phone call.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe was my first hero, really, he doesn\u2019t like that term actually but as a man, you know, he set a good example of what it means to be an empathetic and caring person,\u201d Amanda Eberhardt said.<\/p>\n
For Amanda Eberhardt, seeing the man she admires most become a victim of a scheme has been devastating.<\/p>\n
\u201cI came back from Vietnam with PTSD, and this has just brought it back on all over again,\u201d Tom Eberhardt said.<\/p>\n
It happened on Oct. 27, the day of her father\u2019s 76th birthday.<\/p>\n
Tom Eberhardt said he received a call from a woman claiming to be an Apple representative telling him his account had been compromised in connection to racketeering and money laundering activities.<\/p>\n
\u201cI said well, I don\u2019t do any of that so I don\u2019t worry about that, but she wanted to tell me how bad it was and wanted to go in more detail,\u201d Eberhardt said.<\/p>\n
He claims the fake representative then asked Eberhardt to download an app on his phone called Cursor. When he opened it, he saw a list of charges the woman claimed were going on his account.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe said, I think you better call Chase Bank and see what\u2019s going on because there\u2019s charges going against your card and everything,\u201d Eberhardt said.<\/p>\n
The woman gave Eberhardt a false Chase Bank phone number.<\/p>\n
When Eberhardt called, a man claiming to be a Chase Bank representative answered telling him he had three charges against his account.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe said the only thing I think you could do is you take the money out, and redeposit it and it will be like a charge to knock out that $24,700 that are prequalified on your account,\u201d Eberhardt said.<\/p>\n
Eberhardt then went to a Chase Bank to withdraw the money. The scammers asked him not to tell anyone.<\/p>\n
Eberhardt was directed to a Wendy\u2019s fast food restaurant where he met with the scammer courier and dropped off $24,000 in cash.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe was a young guy. I would say about 5\u20195”. He had sunglasses and a baseball cap and covered his face a little. He said, ‘Tom.’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘You know what the passcode is.’ I said, ‘Yeah’. I said, ‘Do you know what the passcode is?’ He said, ‘Yeah that\u2019s right.’ I handed him the box of money and stuff like that and he said thanks and left,\u201d Eberhardt said.<\/p>\n
Eberhardt thought the money would be deposited into a new account.<\/p>\n
But the next day, he received a call demanding another $10,000 dollars.<\/p>\n
This time he told Eberhardt there was no courier available to pick up the money, so he asked him to mail it to a New York address.<\/p>\n
Eberhardt did as he was told.<\/p>\n
\u201cTook pictures of all the money on both transactions and everything,\u201d he said. \u00a0<\/p>\n
After mailing the $10,000, Eberhardt realized he had been a victim of a scam.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s what I saved for a long time in retirement. It\u2019s something that people my age want to look forward to and don\u2019t want to depend on other people for. What they\u2019ve done has taken away my dignity and my way of life, trusting people I don\u2019t know,\u201d Eberhardt said.<\/p>\n
Eberhardt said he had signed up at the Oceanside Senior Center to take a class on scams, but he never had the opportunity to complete the course.<\/p>\n
He filed a report with Oceanside Police Department and base authorities who are investigating. Authorities said you should never provide personal or bank information to unsolicited callers.<\/p>\n
The family started a fundraising page to help him recover the money.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"An Oceanside senior Marine veteran was scammed out nearly $35,000 dollars through an elaborate phone call. \u201cHe was…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":377814,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5134],"tags":[5229,1582,276,18010,3549,7264,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":{"0":"post-377813","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-san-diego","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-ca","10":"tag-california","11":"tag-oceanside","12":"tag-san-diego","13":"tag-sandiego","14":"tag-united-states","15":"tag-united-states-of-america","16":"tag-unitedstates","17":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","18":"tag-us","19":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115546895416978823","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/377813","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=377813"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/377813\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/377814"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=377813"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=377813"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=377813"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}