NY magazine’s financial advice columnist admits she lost $50K to scammer claiming to be CIA agent
NY Post
A financial advice columnist for New York Magazine admitted she was scammed out of $50,000 by a con man who claimed to be a CIA agent and ordered her to stuff a shoe box full of cash and hand it to a courier in a white Mercedes.
Charlotte Cowles, who pens a financial advice column for The Cut, the digital fashion news site that operates under the umbrella of New York Magazine, wrote a first-person account on Thursday titled “The Day I Put $50,000 in a Shoe Box and Handed It to a Stranger: I never thought I was the kind of person to fall for a scam.”
According to Cowles, a mysterious man called her one evening in October and got her attention after he knew her Social Security number, home address, the names of family members and that her two-year-old son was playing in the living room of her Brooklyn apartment.
Cowles wrote that the man “told me my home was being watched, my laptop had been hacked, and we were in imminent danger.”
The man also claimed that Cowles had 22 bank accounts, nine vehicles and four properties registered to her name.
The bank accounts, according to the mysterious man, were used to wire more than $3 million overseas, “mostly to Jamaica and Iraq.”
