There Is No Court in America That Wants You to Buy Gift Cards

The FTC warning Craig brings in is a jury duty scam, and the craft in it is worth understanding. An email arrives with a PDF attached. Open it and there is an official-looking arrest warrant, because you failed to appear for jury duty. Call this number before the police come. One of Craig's own Forward to Safety subscribers forwarded him a copy, and his honest first reaction was that it looked legitimate.

Two things break it, and both are things you can carry around. You do not receive a warrant as a PDF by email — it comes in the mail from the court, or a sheriff knocks on your door. And, as Craig puts it flatly, there is no court system anywhere in America that will ask you to run to the pharmacy for a stack of gift cards.

Jeff worries aloud that saying so makes the victims sound stupid, and Craig's answer is the most useful thing in the segment: the entire design is to get the logical brain out of the way and adrenaline into the body. Nobody makes good decisions in that state. These people know where you live, where your courthouse is, your name, your job, your income, your cars — the letter reads as personal because it is.

Then Craig makes it personal about himself, twice, which is what gives the advice weight.

A bank called him. Because he'd just opened an account, he answered — and the caller wouldn't identify himself, kept demanding Craig's name and number, so Craig hung up. He then looked up the bank's number independently, called them, and found it had genuinely been the bank. They wouldn't say "is this Craig Peterson?" because they were guarding against scammers too. Everyone is now so defended that legitimate contact has become indistinguishable from fraud.

And the one that actually cost him: a bank emailed about a $65 balance on a card he'd forgotten during an account move. Craig — his words — Mr. Make-Sure-The-Email-Is-Valid, glanced at it, decided it was malarkey, and deleted it. That missed payment took 80 points off his credit rating.

He closes with his father, long a technology man and a senior VP of operations at a very large bank, who searched Google for Microsoft tech support, called the number in a top result, and was being talked through installing remote-access software when Craig's stepmother looked over his shoulder and said it didn't smell right. Craig shut it down remotely. The attackers were searching the machine for Word documents and spreadsheets, because that is where people keep passwords — and his father kept every bank account in an Excel file.

Also in this segment:

• A business Craig took on as a client after its operating account was emptied. The attackers had been inside long enough to copy the invoice format, then billed that company's customers $100,000–200,000 with a note that the account number had changed — please ACH to this one instead
• "Prove you're human" checkboxes now being weaponised: some ask you to run a PowerShell script to confirm you're not a robot, which hands over the machine
• Tennessee becoming the first state to write its own rule book for fusion plants, clearing a 400 megawatt plant near Oak Ridge for construction within a couple of years, against about $10 billion invested in fusion
• Craig's term for the people doing all this: hosers, because they're trying to hose the money out of your account

Free newsletter: CraigPeterson.com — and Craig offers his client prep documents free to anyone who emails him directly