Lisa Hippe’s nightmare started on March 5 with a “FRAUD ALERT” text from “Chase Security” asking whether she had charged $727.34 at Target.
“It said reply ‘Yes’ or ‘No,’ and of course I said ‘No,’” said Hippe, 61, of Centerville.
Other texts followed, and then a phone call from a man claiming to be from Huntington Bank, her longtime bank.
The caller, who knew Hippe’s name, address and account numbers, said he was a fraud investigator at Huntington. The man, who said his name was Michael Freeman, said that her five accounts at the bank had been compromised and that somebody was trying to “wire” $33,000 out of them.
“He said, ‘What we need to do is to get all of your money out of the bank and get it loaded onto a card so it will be safe,’” she said.
But a major snowstorm had occurred that day, and Hippe told the man she wasn’t going to leave her house. “I mean, I’m a Minnesotan and whatever, but I’m like, ‘No, I’m not going anywhere. It’s going to have to be tomorrow,’” she said.
At 10 a.m. the next day, March 6, the man called again and said scammers were now trying to wire $10,000 out of her accounts. “He said, ‘OK, this is what we’re going to do,’” she said. “‘You need to go to the bank right now.’ He had me really scared.”
The caller said Huntington officials were setting up a “safe” account for her at Chase Bank. He then added a new Chase debit card to her Apple Wallet on her iPhone, and then told her to withdraw all her cash from Huntington — $44,000 – and deposit it into the Chase account through an ATM.
“He said they were doing an investigation, and they thought it was possibly an inside job – that employees were transferring people’s monies out after they deposited them,” she said.
“He said, ‘So this is the plan: When you get to the parking lot, you’ve got to let me know, so that I can unfreeze your accounts because right now your accounts are frozen.’ He said that my username and password and everything was locked up at that point, so I could not go online to look to see what was going on. He told me to keep him on the phone and take my phone into the bank so he could listen. He also said that there was an undercover cop inside the bank, just kind of hanging out, but to pretend not to see him.”
If the teller at the Maplewood branch were to ask why she was taking all that money out, Hippe was to say it was for “personal reasons,” she said. The teller never asked, and Hippe withdrew $20,000 in cash – which the man told her was the limit that she could withdraw from one bank branch in a day.
When Hippe got back to her car, the man told her to drive to the Huntington Bank branch on Fifth Street in White Bear Lake. There, she attempted to withdraw $24,000 – the total amount left in her five accounts and the two accounts belonging to her and husband Ted’s only child, Jasmine Hippe, which were linked to Lisa Hippe’s accounts. Jasmine Hippe, who lives in Ojai, Calif., lost $12,000 in the scam.
The teller in White Bear Lake wouldn’t initially let Lisa Hippe withdraw any money because Hippe had recently applied for her Real ID, and had holes punched in her driver’s license. She had left the accompanying paper document at home, she said.
“I didn’t have that when I went to Maplewood, and the teller there did not question it at all,” she said. “But when I went to White Bear, she questioned it. So then I’m like, ‘Crap.’ I had to go all the way home and get that piece of paper.”
She returned and withdrew the remaining $24,000. The man then directed her to the Chase Bank on White Bear Avenue in Maplewood. He gave her a code to enter into the ATM and had Hippe tap her iPhone on the pad. She then fed $44,000 in cash into the machine, which takes stacks of 150 bills at a time, she said.
‘Stripped’ and ‘violated’
By the time Hippe realized something was wrong, it was too late — the money was gone, and nothing could be done to recover it.
“He said he was having the receipts emailed, but I didn’t even put my email in there,” she said. “I don’t know where these receipts were going. I had this whole list of questions.
“When I got home from doing all this, I made a list of questions like, ‘I need the whole card number, I need a card for my husband, I need a PIN number.’ I was still just sucked into this and not realizing what happened until Jasmine called me in tears, telling me that all of her money was gone. And then it was just like somebody hit me over the head with a mallet.”
Two weeks later, Hippe said she still feels “stripped” and “violated.”
“I’m just non-trusting of anybody at this point,” she said. “I am scared to do anything online. I mean, we opened up a new account at a new bank, and I kept pushing them. I’m like, ‘OK, so you are sure this is safe?’”
She said she is embarrassed to admit that she never questioned what the man was telling her. “Unfortunately, it’s just the opposite,” she said. “He made me feel comfortable with him. He made me feel like he was truly helping me. I felt like I was in an FBI sting with him. God, I even told him that. I was with this guy probably for five hours that day. I still blame myself because I was sucked in.
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“I feel like sometimes I’m a little gullible, and I’m just too trusting of people,” said Hippe, the former manager of Keys Cafe in Forest Lake. “I choose to see the good in people. I know there are a lot of bad people out there, but I know there are good people out there, too.”
The day after Hippe was scammed, she and husband Ted each received a letter from Change Healthcare saying a massive cyberattack at the company, a UnitedHealth Group subsidiary, might have involved their data.
“Don’t ignore those data-breach letters, people,” she said. “Stay alert. Change your passwords. I think that somebody took my information, and it’s out there on the ‘dark web.’ Somebody sold it to somebody, and I believe that’s how they got it. I’m so afraid that this is not finished.”
Evolving tactics
The Maplewood Police Department is investigating, but officials at Huntington and Chase have told Hippe that there isn’t anything the banks can do.
A spokesman for Huntington National Bank said Wednesday that he could not comment on a specific customer’s account, but said the company takes allegations of fraud seriously and conducts a thorough review.
“We remain committed to educating customers on safeguarding their finances and recognizing scams,” said Kris Dahl, vice president of regional communications. “Fraudsters continually evolve their tactics, often using sophisticated methods to deceive individuals. Huntington Bank provides resources to help customers identify and prevent fraud.”
Maplewood police Detective Derek Fritze said the area code of the man’s phone number, 863, serves south-central Florida, including cities like Lakeland, Winter Haven and Sebring, but that he could have been calling from anywhere.
“They can easily ‘spoof’ the number,” he said, referring to the practice of scammers disguising a phone number to convince a victim they are interacting with a trusted source. “It’s getting out of hand.”
Fritze said Maplewood police are currently investigating more than 15 scam reports with losses “ranging from a few thousand dollars to hundreds of thousands of dollars.”
“The scams are getting more difficult to figure out, and they’re always changing,” he said. “By the time we figure something out, it just gets changed into something else.”
Unfortunately, he said, most of the money lost in scams is not recovered.
Fritze said he and another Maplewood investigator often give educational presentations about scams and how they work.
“What we’re finding is that what gets the best result is just to educate people about what’s out there,” he said. “So when something comes up, they can say, ‘Oh wait, I heard this was a scam.’”
A plea to help and to heed
Jasmine Hippe has started a GoFundMe online fundraiser for her parents (gofund.me/a0bd1f85).
“On March 6, scammers drained my parents’ bank accounts, stealing their entire savings — over $40,000 — and leaving them with nothing to cover their basic needs,” Jasmine Hippe wrote. “Now, they are struggling to pay their bills, feed themselves and their two dogs, afford gas and cover essential health expenses — all with just the few hundred they had in cash at the time.”
Ted Hippe, a printing pressman, “works overtime each week to support them both, hoping to retire in a few years,” she wrote. “But now, with their entire savings stolen, I fear that may not be possible.”
Jasmine Hippe said it was “heartbreaking that bank tellers did not flag this transaction as suspicious.”
Had Lisa Hippe transferred the money to a different account, rather than withdraw it in cash, bank officials might have been able to “stop it after the fact,” Jasmine Hippe said. “Because she took out cash and then brought it to an ATM, there was nothing that either bank could do for us.”
“I’m sharing their story not only to seek help for my parents but also to warn others,” Jasmine Hippe wrote in her GoFundMe post. “Please talk to your parents and grandparents about phone and text scams. Warn them never to trust unexpected calls from ‘banks,’ never to withdraw or transfer money under pressure, and always verify with their bank directly.”
Since sharing her parents’ story, Jasmine Hippe said has heard from many people who have “received phone calls like this or almost fell for scams like this. It seems as if they’re targeting a lot of people 60 years old and older.”
The man on the phone with Lisa Hippe even warned her about sharing information over the phone, she said. “He said, ‘You know scammers can get your information, so be careful,’” Jasmine Hippe said. “They build that trust, and then they’re creating that sense of fear and urgency of, like, ‘They’re taking more money. They’re taking more money, and you need to act now.’ These people just get locked in, and it’s like your critical-thinking abilities shut down because you’re in that state of fear and almost panic. It’s really sad.”
What really breaks Jasmine Hippe’s heart is that her mother mentioned the first call from the scammer to her when they talked on the phone that night.
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“We all kind of pushed for more information, like, ‘That’s weird that they would send you to Chase Bank,’ but she told us that she was going to Huntington the next day to talk to somebody, so I thought, ‘OK, well, she’s going to talk to a teller, and she’s in good hands,’” she said. “We didn’t realize she was being scammed.”
Lisa Hippe said she wanted to share her story publicly as a warning to others.
“I want people to know that they have to stay vigilant,” she said. “I just don’t want this to happen to anybody else, and I know it will, but if I can help in any way to bring awareness to what is happening, I am willing to do that. … I don’t know if I am ever going to get back the feeling that I had before this — that feeling of being safe and secure in my life. He knocked that out of me. Maybe forever.”
