Scams: Stop, Spot, Report

In part 1 of my tech discussions, I talked about the fact that our highly connected and digital world has grown with limited amounts of safety training for residents. In some of my earliest conversations with the Town about digital security, I stressed that: not every resident in Norwood has the same relationship with tech safety training. Like not everyone gets to … enjoy … the quarterly company mandated InfoSec exercises. People come from many walks of life. Some jobs don’t require computer interaction at all. Some people are young and using devices before they’ve even gotten to school. Some are elders who may have been out of the job market before such technology had become mainstream. This is a recipe for a public safety crisis. And we’re definitely in one.

Scams are out of control nation wide. Billions of dollars lost, lives disrupted, and dire consequences. For the longest time, the attitude was “well there’s nothing we can do”. But there is. In collaboration with the Town Manager, I and several other staff founded an Anti-Scam Task Force to focus on how this huge issue was impacting our residents specifically, with the bigger goal of: could we do anything about it?

Year 1

The scope of the problem quickly became apparent to all of us. I directed the Task Force to divide the problem into quadrants, and each of us would focus hard on that quadrant and then we’d organize it into a logical flow of what would make the most sense based on what we discovered. Each member of the Task Force brought a different strength to the table. Our Senior Center staff and Banking representatives had the benefit of direct interactions with our Seniors to hear about victim’s stories. Our Police Detectives had insights about different fraud cases they had worked. I had insights from working in the private sector on SaaS products and at Credit Bureaus. We had inputs from Mental Health and Banking institutions, from other local governmental departments such as the Register of Deeds and the District Attorney’s office. I attended seminars and workshops at the MMA and the ICMA, and our Librarians worked on finding other existing publications and resources.

We immediately identified a couple of critical things.

Problem 1: DATA Survivorship

While there was great National and State data about scams, at the local level it became less clear. If a scammer succeeded, we had plenty of detailed reporting on what happened. But if someone reported a “near miss” where the scammer didn’t succeed, the intake for those cases didn’t have much detail. After all, no harm done if the person didn’t lose any money, right?

The trouble is that means you only see the ones who got caught. There’s a famous tale from WW2 about how Statisticians figured out a way to better protect warplanes. Planes would return with bullet holes, so initially the thought was to re-enforce the places where the planes were shown to have been getting shot. Abraham Wald noticed a pattern when he mapped every spot where a returning plane had been hit:

The planes that were making it back had not been shot along certain areas of the wing and tail. It turned out that the absence of the bullet holes is what indicated where the most critical area was to re-enforce, because those were places that a plane getting shot would result in the plane not making it back to tell the tale.

We needed data about the unsuccessful and successful scams to fully approach the problem. So our Detectives began asking the other officers and dispatchers to gather more specific details about the “near misses”. We began showing residents how to report scammers even if they hadn’t lost any money. We set up a new inbox to collect non-urgent scam reports. We trained people on how to use the “report junk” buttons on their texts and email inboxes.

Now we were getting a more clear picture of how Norwood was comparing to regional and national trends. Which lead to another common problem to tackle . . .

Problem 2: Stigma

As we gathered stories and built trust in the Community, we learned that not only were scams under reported, but there had even been scammers who had succeeded, yet the victims had not come forward. That people felt embarrassed or ashamed to admit what had happened to them. Many suffered in silence. That meant not only pain for the victim and their families, but it left the scammer free to prey on the next target with the same techniques.

We worked to understand the underpinnings of the feelings of shame, and tuned our messaging accordingly to better encourage people to come forward. We mapped out strategies for how we would engage the public to lower stigma and to get people sharing. Scammers work a bit like magicians, but a magician’s tricks don’t work so well if everybody is talking about how the trick works before the magician performs. The more we could get people talking about what was going on, sharing what to watch out for, the higher the odds that a person could stop, spot the scam, and report it before any further damage could be done.

Problem 3: Problems of Scale

Our earliest Task Force meetings we had thoughts of building out a sort of dictionary or catalog of scams. But there were so many and they evolved so quickly, that by the time we even thought about doing some kind of literature or hand outs, they’d already be outdated! We’d never be able to keep up. Instead, we shifted our approach to focusing on what all the scams had in common, and focus on teaching residents how to spot the symptoms of a scam in progress. This way, no matter how scammers tried to adapt their techniques, their end aims could be short circuited.

Gathering more and more and more information about the anatomy of so many different kinds of scams hit on the last big problem.

Problem 4: A Public Safety Crisis

In my work with Impact Norwood as the Board of Selectmen’s representative, I began to get information on a troubling trend . . . scams committed against young people. Meanwhile, as I stitched together data from the State and Fed, I noticed an interesting metric. While Seniors lost higher quantities of money to scammers, scammers tricked young people with a higher rate of success. Scammers were not keeping their focus as narrow as we had believed. A much broader range of the Community was being targeted.

As we adjusted our approach to this new revelation, we found that

Innocent bystanders would sometimes be pulled into the scams without realizing it, such as a delivery driver or a cashier being used as unaware intermediary.
Businesses were being targeted with similar techniques.
Sometimes scammers would combine techniques, such as targeting a grandchild in order to trick them into helping the scammer gain access to a Senior

This problem needed a more holistic approach, and thereby protect Seniors, Children, and the entire community.

Year 2

With our data gathered, our techniques honed, and our approach refined, we started to do more outreach. We’ve hosted PSA forums at the Senior Center, the Library, and more. We gathered free literature that we could redistribute and set up community tables at high foot traffic events like Norwood Day. We used statistics to calculate how many reports we “should” see based on regional and national trends, and compared it with our newly refined data. We made video PSAs from the Police Department and the Selectmen. We gained new allies in the County and in other communities who were interested in our work and eager to exchange knowledge.

And as we engaged with residents, we gradually began to see a shift in behavior. Businesses started to post reminders near gift cards about scams. Tellers began to intervene when they saw the signs of an Elder being scammed. More and more victims began to talk openly about what had happened to them, which then lead to friends and relatives taking caution to avoid the same scams. We were starting to turn the wheel on public awareness and engagement around scams.

Year 3

By the third year of its existence, the Anti-Scam Task Force was becoming seasoned and expert on these topics, and finding new ways to help. In our early days, we had essentially focused on prevention. The message had been ‘try not to let it happen because once it happens there’s not a lot we can do’. I wasn’t satisfied with that notion. Talking with residents and other officials and other members of the Task Force, they felt the same. There’s a lot of anger and frustration when it feels like ‘nothing can be done’. These are innocent vulnerable victims of a crime, which in some cases can be devastating. We learned about “ransom” and “romance” scams, where the victim feels entrapped and powerless to get out of the scam. We learned about victims who had performed self harm in response to being targeted. There had to be more we could do. None of us were willing to just give up.

We joined an international organization focused on fraud detection, as well as networking with other agencies. I networked with employees of major Infosec companies with international clients. Our Detectives gained even more knowledge about how the funds passed around once the scammer had a hold of them. We learned about who (and where) the scammers were (spoiler alert: a ton of scammers are actually people who have themselves been tricked and trapped in scam operation centers against their will, forced to scam other people!).

In our third year, we’ve not only began to shed light on these dynamics so that residents better understand the full picture, it has also allowed us to start to be able to claw back what was lost and on a few occasions even catch the actual scammers.

As the end of my term and election day was approaching, in my last meeting with the Task Force, I forewarned them that they needed to be thinking about the future. If it’s one thing I learned over the years is to never take your role on the Board of Selectmen for granted; we can’t always predict or assume the outcome of elections. What would they do if I didn’t win re-election, which Board Member would they be interested in and I could forward that sentiment to the rest of the Board, and so forth.

I’ll tell you my vision for where I want to see the Task Force go next if I’m fortunate enough to be re-elected by the people of Norwood, and the Task Force insists that they want me back to keep going . . .

Amanda’s Vision for a 2nd term as Selectman with the Anti-Scam Task Force

In our 4th year, with the knowledge and skills we’ve gained, I believe that the time has come for upward and outward public outreach.

1 - New Scam Safety Program

I have been mentoring with the Fire Department, observing their very successful program where they REGULARLY directly engage with the Senior Center, the Public Housing Authority, and the Schools. Everybody knows “Firefighter Paul”, right? Well I’m modeling a program that harnesses the success of what our First Responders do with Public Safety and adapting it for Scam Safety. Because especially at a time when we don’t have the Hospital, the more scams we prevent, the fewer call runs for our already overburdened First Responders. You know how “Stop Drop and Roll” became a slogan that everyone knows? Well that’s how I want “Stop, Spot, Report” to become. That happened because First Responders regularly engage the community with a planned program and routine visits by a known trusted recognizable figure from the Fire Department. I’d like to mimic this same successful model, because from Fire Safety to CPR, this kind of direct PSA work works! Particularly for Youth and Seniors, who need a regular opportunity to have access to these safety principles because technology is more and more a part of the fabric of our daily experiences.

2 - New PSA Series

I want to work with NCM to start a PSA where highly recognizable and respected members of the Norwood community share a story about a time that they got scammed. With the “It Can Happen To Anyone” campaign, we’ll further de-stigmatize talking about (and thus preventing) the tricks that scammers try.

3 - Editorialize Scams

I’ve had interest from the local news outlets about starting up a regular “scam corner” section. I feel like we’re finally in a place where we have the knowledge, tools, and tales to make a regular segment possible! I’m eager to get this program going. In case you can’t tell from the length of this blog posts, I could talk about scams all day haha!

4 - Youth and Parent Outreach

I’m currently connecting the Task Force with Impact Norwood and looking to build out programming for youth and for parents on how to keep their family safe from scammers. This can be everything from teaching kids about the way scammers may try to trick them into hurting their parents or grandparents, to ways that parents can give safety tips for their children at home. I know a lot of concerned parents have the strategy of simply not providing, or locking kids out of, digital devices, but it’s important to have safety training the same way we do for other types of dangers. It’s for times when our children may encounter situations outside the home, such as sharing a friend’s phone or being approached by a stranger wearing “smart eye glasses” using stolen data to claim to be someone they know. Scammers always rely on the same underlying principles no matter what the technology, so getting this safety knowledge out there is so important. Our Impact Norwood coalition is very familiar with offering workshops for parents on today’s issues, so this collaboration should be a natural fit!

5 - REGIONAL Outreach

A huge point of frustration that residents have expressed to me doing this work is a feeling like all the weight of defending against scammers is resting on residents. It’s exhausting and frightening, even when you know what to watch for. I saw this really awesome program at the Register of Deeds where they’ve designed a Consumer Notification Service for residents to get alerts if somebody tries to submit fraudulent documents in their name. And when we met with staff from the District Attorney’s office, they shared credit card protection sleeves with useful contact info to their office. It’s clear to me that other officials have each been chipping away at this problem from their own angles. I think that our Task Force is now in an excellent position to start linking these efforts together and to create broader regional strength against scams as a result. We already plan to be out lobbying in neighboring communities about the Hospital, so this is a natural opportunity to also bring our Anti-Scam Task Force show on the road too. As we’ve learned from our efforts chasing down stolen funds, when you network with other officials, it enhances the effort.

5 - Editorialize Scams

6 - Build Out Grassroots Upward Lobbying

As we continue to grow the community and regional awareness about scams, and build our coalition of anti-scam defenders, this will allow us to become a powerful voice to push for changes that protect residents. There are still way too many ways that scammers can take advantage of things. For example, the notion that ad platforms don’t have to particularly bother scrutinizing who is buying ads from them, and then turn a profit on what ultimately is a Senior being defrauded, is outrageous and dangerous. We need stronger protections, and the only way that’s going to happen is the same way change always happens: grassroots community work by people who know about the problem and who care. Like me!

I have SUCH a passion about this, so please please come out to vote on Monday April 7th between 7am and 8pm, and if you’re willing to have me back for a 2nd term, I’d love to keep doing the work of protecting Norwood from scammers.

Amanda GrowApril 3, 2025