An Oakland woman is fighting to recover her life savings after a scammer posing as a Charles Schwab representative drained her account through a frantic phone scheme.
Jazz Powell-Loggins, an Oakland resident, told ABC 7 that the attack began with an unexpected call from an unknown number. The person on the line immediately started screaming that someone was trying to “sell” the money out of her account.
“And it was panic, panic immediately. ‘Hey, some- someone’s trying to sell your money out of your account, and I’m trying to help you. Hey, and by the way, by the way, I’m a representative of Charles Schwab,'” Powell-Loggins said.
She tried to process the barrage. “And I said, what do you mean someone – I said, I don’t understand what. Relax. You’re- I don’t understand. I can’t hear you. And he was really loud, and he kept getting louder. I said, what are you talking about?”
Powell-Loggins hung up to take a call from her doctor. Two minutes later, a notification appeared: $12,145 had been wire transferred out of her bank account.
The loss struck at the core of her family’s plans. “That was devastating for me,” Powell-Loggins said, “because I… my job was to make sure that my son got out of college with no debt and to help him fulfill his dreams.”
She has been out of work on disability after suffering an injury at a big-box warehouse store job, and her husband has been battling cancer. The emptied account came as another crushing blow.
Charles Schwab rejected her appeal for compensation. The firm claimed she had provided a “verification code to a third party, allowing them to complete the wire.”
Powell-Loggins disputed this account. “I’ve shown nothing but integrity and hung out with this company. And for them to tell me, we believe you have something to do with it. We’re not giving you back a dime. Good riddance. That was devastating to me,” she said.
The company offered a statement of sympathy without accepting financial responsibility. “We sympathize with Ms. Powell-Loggins, whose experience is an unfortunate example of growing imposter fraud… We advise our clients to be cautious, stay vigilant, protect their personal information,” they wrote to ABC 7.
Jasika Bawa, Project Lead for Google’s Chrome Security, analyzed how the scheme may have worked. She told ABC 7 that the phone call itself could have served as a diversion.
“There might be informational alerts from the bank that would say, ‘Hey, by the way, like, you know, $1,000 was just moved from this place to another,'” Bawa said. “But while you’re on the phone, you know, being bombarded with this, like, stressful information from the attacker, you might miss that kind of information.”
Bawa added that the attacker may have brute-forced their way into the account. “I would just say, many pins are very short, like four digits. It can even be brute-forced by an attacker. By brute-forced, we mean they can just guess pins one after another, because they’re a bit too short,” she said.
The stolen funds were traced to a bank in Ohio, according to ABC 7.
Powell-Loggins has contacted both police and the FBI, and she plans to take her case to arbitration.
