Last week, Charlotte Cowles—a seasoned journalist with a notable tenure at the New York Times and a seven-year streak of writing a personal finance column at The Cut—published a piece about how she’d fallen for a wild scam. It began innocently enough: a phone call from someone claiming to be from Amazon customer service, checking in about some suspicious account activity. What she didn’t know when she picked up the phone was that this call was the start of an elaborate scam that would eventually lead her to part with $50,000 from her emergency savings.
