Last Saturday I was standing in line at a food truck at the Earth Day event in my neighborhood. A young, college-aged, likely Ivy League couple was waiting behind me in line. The young woman receives a phone call. It's a wrong number, but something causes her to prod the caller, asking where they got the number, why they were calling, who they were trying to reach. I just assumed it was some strange byproduct of privilege; when I get a wrong number, I don't harass the caller.
She gets off the phone and starts to tell her companion a story: that was the second time she had been contacted by someone looking for "Auto Connections." The first caller didn't leave any other details, but this more recent caller claimed to have loaned this person $30,000, in exchange merely for that given cell phone number. It sounded strange, and I, eavesdropping, wondered whether the caller themselves were perpetrating a scam, or were victims as was more likely. I just don't know anyone who would hand out a $30,000 loan (and to something called "Auto Connections"? How does this work? What was the purpose?), but it still sounds like the kind of predatory practice taken out on the old and/or poor, like a co-worker of mine who always seems to be the victim of bad scams like too-good-to-be-true "vacation timeshares." The young woman calls her mother and further explains the situation, asking her mother to monitor the bank accounts "in case of identity theft."
Ironically enough, I took a picture right at the moment this was occurring, just to set the scene for you:
(To add to the strangeness of this story, it was at exactly this moment that a fellow Rigorous Intuition poster walked by with some of their friends and waved.)
On Wednesday of this week, I was sitting in my studio in the afternoon, working. My coworker received a call, and it was a wrong number. He's a very forward guy, and so he begins to ask questions of the caller: who they were trying to reach, how they got the number, whether they found it online, were told it verbally, or had it on a business card or other printed/written material, etc. He actually begins to provide them with some of his own details: "you're actually the second person today to call me looking for A______ at 'Auto Connections'." I perked up at that one, and got up and walked over to his desk just as he was finishing up with the call.
I told him, "before you say anything about what just happened, I need to tell you something I overheard last weekend," and proceeded to relay the story of the $30,000 loan. He was shocked, and asked if I was fucking kidding him. That was exactly what his call was about. I knew for certain now that I had witnessed a scam, but still didn't know if these callers were victims or perpetrators, but were likely victims. I couldn't wrap my head around having overheard precisely the same kind of phone conversation twice in one week. Either it was an insane coincidence, or it was a very widespread scam in our city, and this was about to happen to everyone.
My coworker said that the earlier caller had been a woman, and the more recent one had been a man. Both sounded "totally normal, like just regular people." He felt obliged to call them both back and report what I had just told him. It was then that he discovered that both the female and male callers had called from the same number; he assumed they were related and were calling about the same inquiry. However, when he called, a machine picked up and said that he had reached a municipality hall in New Jersey. There was no directory, so he spoke to someone in security and told them the story, as he felt it was the best he could do. Security of course knew nothing.
I searched for "Auto Connections" in my area but could not really find anything out-of-sorts. There seemed to be a number of legitimate-seeming entities calling themselves that.
I still can't tell exactly what was going on.
