Every Scam Tells a Bigger Story

Cybercrime Magazine · October 27, 2026

Fighting scams takes more than awareness—it takes collaboration, intelligence, and compassion. –Michelle McCluer, Vice President, Global Fusion and Intelligence, Mastercard San Jose, Calif. – Oct. 27, 2026 It started with a text that appeared to be meant for someone else. “Hi, is this Anna? Are The post Every Scam Tells a Bigger Story appeared first on Cybercrime Magazine .

– Michelle McCluer , Vice President, Global Fusion and Intelligence, Mastercard

San Jose, Calif. – Oct. 27, 2026

It started with a text that appeared to be meant for someone else.

“Hi, is this Anna? Are we still on for lunch Thursday?”

Linda wrote back to say the texter had the wrong number. He apologized, said his name was John, and they traded a joke about autocorrect. That should have been the end of it. A few days later, John sent a photo of the sunset from his balcony and said he hoped she didn’t mind. She didn’t. Linda was 67, a retired schoolteacher. Her husband had died two years before, and her kids lived several states away. The house got very quiet after dinner. It was nice to be thought of.

Linda is not a single person. She is drawn from the stories fraud investigators and victim advocates hear every day. If you work in this field, you know someone just like her. And if you don’t, there is still a chance you’ve already met someone like her across your own kitchen table.

How it happens

For the next couple of months, “John” was simply part of Linda’s day. Good morning messages. Questions about her tomatoes. Real sympathy when she talked about her husband. He told her about his divorce, his daughter in college, the career in digital asset trading that had given him a comfortable life. He never asked her for anything. He listened, and he remembered everything.

So when he mentioned an investment platform that had helped him plan for retirement, it didn’t feel like a pitch. It felt like a friend looking out for her. She invested $2,000. She watched the balance grow. She pulled a little out to make sure it was real, and it seemed like it was. And for the first time in a long while, Linda felt hopeful.

She put in more money. Then more. By the end, most of her retirement savings was sitting on that platform.

When she tried to take out a larger amount, the site told her she owed taxes first. Then a verification fee. He was calm and reassuring. “This happens, it’s paperwork, don’t worry.” She paid. Walking away at that point would have meant admitting the money might already be gone, and she wasn’t ready to face that.

Then the platform disappeared. Then “John” did too.

What comes after

This is the part we don’t talk about enough. Victims describe reading back through months of messages, again and again, hunting for the moment they should have seen it. They grieve the money, but many grieve the relationship even more, because to them it was real. They dread telling their children. The embarrassment is crushing, and most never report it at all. People describe it as a loss that feels like a death. For some, the despair becomes unbearable.

And here is what stays with me. Linda did everything we tell people to do every October. She never clicked a strange link. She never gave up a password. She wasn’t careless. She was lonely and kind, and she was targeted by professional scammers who study human emotion the way software engineers study code.

The person on the other end

The man texting Linda probably didn’t exist. The person actually typing may well have been a young man who answered an online ad for a customer service job overseas. When he landed, his passport was taken, and he was told he owed a debt he would never be able to repay.

That is what sits behind so much of today’s fraud. A UN human rights report published this February put the number of people working inside scam operations across Southeast Asia at 300,000 or more. Survivors described compounds the size of small towns, some covering more than 500 acres, ringed with barbed wire and patrolled by armed guards. One man recounted being sold by his recruiter for $5,000, then made to work 15-hour days, seven days a week, running several conversations with targets at once.

Two victims, half a world apart, tied together by a script written by organized crime.

The scale

The Global Anti-Scam Alliance estimates that people around the world lost $442 billion to scams in 2025, much of it driven by professional operations based in hundreds of compounds across Southeast Asia, particularly in Myanmar and Cambodia. The US State Department has said Americans alone lost at least $10 billion to these networks in 2024.

And it’s spreading. Identified victims now come from roughly 80 countries, and the model is showing up in the Middle East, Africa, Europe, South Asia, the Pacific, and Latin America. Crackdowns matter, and hundreds of centers have shut down this year. But a lot of the infrastructure is still standing, and some compounds are reportedly filling back up. Push it out of one place and it reappears in another.

Why “don’t click” can’t carry the weight

When we treat scams mainly as a failure of personal judgment, we get a few things badly wrong.

We misjudge who we’re up against. These are businesses, with scripts, quotas, and managers. They are built to exploit the best parts of us: our loneliness, our hope, our generosity, our wish to be seen. It isn’t reasonable to expect a widow, a teenager, or frankly any of us to outsmart that every time.

We also make the harm worse. When the message victims hear is “you should have known better,” they go quiet. Quiet means fewer reports, and fewer reports mean those of us on the defending side have less to work with when we’re trying to protect the next Linda.

And we look in the wrong place. A scam isn’t one moment of bad judgment. It’s a supply chain: trafficked labor, bought or stolen phone numbers and accounts, social media outreach, fake trading platforms, payment rails, and cash-out. Almost none of that is within the victim’s control. Much of it is within ours.

What my team sees

In leading Mastercard’s Global Fusion and Intelligence organization, I see these threats run together constantly. In leading Mastercard’s Global Fusion and Intelligence organization, I see these threats run together constantly. What looks like consumer fraud to local law enforcement may be part of a money laundering network to the FBI, a sanctions issue to Treasury, or a human rights concern to another agency. Each sees a piece of the puzzle. Bringing those pieces together reveals the bigger picture. These compounds thrive where governance is weak, where armed groups provide protection, and where officials can be paid to look away. That makes this a problem of intelligence and diplomacy as much as cybersecurity. No single company, platform, or government agency can see the everything.

Imagine a different ending

Picture Linda’s story with a few more people in it. A telecom provider spots the mass “wrong number” campaign and blocks it before it ever reaches her phone. A platform catches the network of fake profiles working together. Her bank notices a pattern that looks like investment fraud and calls her before the biggest transfer goes through. Law enforcement, working alongside private sector partners, follows the money and links her case to hundreds of others.

Every one of those players holds a piece. That’s why our partnerships with law enforcement matter so much to us. The real breakthroughs happen when those pieces come together quickly, between people who trust each other.

That trust takes years to build, and it’s harder than any technology. Partnerships work when everyone brings real information to the table, protects what they’re given, and actually acts on it. They break down when sharing only flows one direction, or when red tape slows information until it’s no longer useful.

Awareness, evolved

I’m not saying individual awareness doesn’t matter. It does. It just needs to evolve.

It should show people how these scams really unfold, the slow, patient weeks of trust building, so they recognize the pattern rather than hunting for a single red flag. It should tell victims plainly: this was done to you by criminals, and coming forward helps protect someone else. And it needs to reach the people most often targeted, older adults and young people alike, through voices they already trust.

For a lot of us, that starts at home. I’m a mother myself and if I’ve learned anything, it’s that the best protection is often just a phone call. Check in on the people you love. Ask who they’ve been talking to lately, and ask it without judgment. Make it safe for them to tell you when something feels off, and just as safe to tell you when it has already gone wrong.

Companies have homework too. Security leaders should be asking whether their fraud, cyber, and intelligence teams actually talk to each other, and whether their organization contributes to industry and law enforcement efforts or only takes from them.

Why this matters

My team describes the way we work in three words. Mission-Driven, Decency-First, and Intelligence-Backed. Our mission is protecting people and the trust that commerce depends on. Decency means remembering that the scam economy has two sets of victims. There are people like Linda, who lose their savings and their sense of safety, and the people forced, often brutally, to take it from them. And intelligence, shared responsibly and acted on fast, is how we lift the burden off individuals and put it on the systems that are actually built to fight back.

So yes, this October, let’s keep reminding people to think before they click. But let’s also be honest with them about what they’re facing. And when someone like Linda finally works up the courage to ask for help, let’s make sure she’s met with compassion, not blame, by a system that’s already working to stop the next text before it ever arrives.

If you or someone you know has been affected by a scam, report it to your local law enforcement or the FBI’s IC3 in the US. If you’re struggling, please reach out to the 988 Lifeline which is available 24/7/365.

– Michelle McCluer , Vice President, Global Fusion and Intelligence, Mastercard