A prominent leader of the Coachella Valley Hispanic community falls for scammers and loses thousands of dollars.
Now she seeks to alert others so that they do not fall victims like her.
Rosa Lucas is one of the founders of Volunteers in Medicine, a health center that offers free services to the community.
And periodically the East Coachella Valley helping a large number of causes.
Lucas says he never lets his guard down when it comes to senior fraud attempts.
But for some reason on May 26 it fell into one.
“The truth makes me feel sorry and ashamed, but I have to share what happened, so that it doesn’t happen to others,” Lucas said.
Lucas says that he had not received his parking ticket for an event at Acrisure Arena.
Venue representatives referred her to Ticketmaster and then called a number that appears in the results of the google search engine.
Respondents said they were able to help her with her request but they needed her venmo account.
Confident that he was a legitimate representative, she gave them her information, and they promised her $155 and her ticket in exchange for $10.
In the midst of all this, he answered a call from a woman who identified herself as a representative of his bank.
“She told me that they were stealing and she saw that they had taken 450 from my bank, and that I should hang up with them immediately,” Lucas said.
On that same call, the woman told Lucas that he could help her with the scam and that she was working with the FBI to stop the fraud.
“I felt very confident that she told me you have to go to your bank and get cash,” Lucas said.
They then instructed him to take the money to a nearby ATM that had protection codes.
In the hope of solving the problem, he withdrew nearly $20,000 from his account.
“I put in hundreds, $15,000, which was the maximum, and I did it,” Lucas said.
When he finished, they sent him some receipts and told him that he had to repeat the process again the next day.
That’s when she realized something wasn’t right.
His doubts were confirmed when he saw his bank speak and explained what happened.
Lucas claims that the page he entered to look up the ticketmaster number seemed legitimate.
However, more and more scammers are creating pages that look like ticketmasters with fake numbers and appear in the results of pages like google.
Lucas has made reports to the authorities and they have warned him that he probably will not see his money that he lost again.
“My confidence is broken, I’m nervous”
Ticketmaster advises that if you need answers, the best option is through their support page.
And that they will never ask for gifts on Venmo in exchange for their services.
