As an ABC News alum and current CBS News chief correspondent, Matt Gutman has reported on scams “so many times,” he said. But he told social media followers on Friday that he had just gotten “completely scammed.”
As he explained in a video he shared on X and Instagram, Gutman got a call an hour earlier from someone who claimed to work in fraud protection at Bank of America. That person told gave him a name and a badge ID and said that people were trying to illegally withdraw money from his account. The caller also said there was significant fraud activity at the Bank of America location where Gutman does his banking.
“She told me, listen, we think that there are two fraudsters at the bank. They go by these aliases. She gave me the names,” he recalled. “And then she said, what we need you to do in order to intercept these fraudsters is to go into the bank and withdraw everything from your bank account, which wasn’t that much money at this point, and take it with you so you have it in cash. And that’ll trigger the fraudsters into action. That’s how we’ll be able to catch them.”
Gutman revealed he started following those instructions before realizing he was being conned. “I go to the teller, and I start doing the thing, and I’m like, there is no way that this is possibly real, that anybody would use a regular civilian for a sting operation at a bank,” he said. “And I am a journalist, and I’ve done scam stories so many times throughout my career and I came so close to falling for it. Now, the most scary and the dangerous part is that I would have been walking around with thousands of dollars in cash at a place known to those scammers because they directed me to my local bank branch. And I was told that this happens all the time. And then they either rob your car or they rob you.”
Gutman said the “very scary experience” showed him he wasn’t as savvy as he thought he was. “You’ve got to be so careful,” he told followers. “And some of these scams are incredibly sophisticated with people who clearly know what they are talking about and speak like they are in the profession. I’m just blown away by how good that person was. I can’t get over this. Anyway, I just hope this doesn’t happen to you. But beware, these people are out there, and they are good.”
In his caption, Gutman gave a shout-out to the Los Angeles Police Department and Bank of America for helping him “avert a potentially dangerous disaster.”
On Saturday, Gutman posted a follow-up video to social media, giving followers tips for avoiding scams, including hanging up on suspected scammers and calling the number on the back of one’s bank card to speak with a legitimate bank employee. He also said no bank would ask customers to pull money out of their account, and he said that that purported bank employees telling customers not to say anything is another red flag.
This story originally appeared on TV Insider
