Fairhaven Daycare Owner Scammed Out of Thousands of Dollars

It hasn't been a very good week for Katie Gonzalez. She was punching away on her laptop Monday morning, catching up on some work at It Takes a Village, the Fairhaven daycare on Main Street. Suddenly, something started going wrong with her laptop.

"It started beeping and saying I could have been hacked and that I needed to call a number for Microsoft," she said.

She called what she thought was Microsoft and the gentleman on the line walked her through some scans to diagnose the issue.

"When the scan was finished at the bottom of my screen it said that someone from Russia had hacked my computer and had downloaded child porn," Gonzalez said.

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Gonzalez was rocked to the core. The man on the phone told her to call her bank after they got off the phone to make sure the hackers didn't charge anything.

Here's where things get even weirder.

Gonzalez said she called the number on the back of her bank card and spoke with what she believed to be the fraud unit. The bank accurately read back recent transactions that Gonzalez had indeed made, alleviating doubts that she was really talking to her bank.

Gonzalez now realizes she wasn't talking to her bank at all. The scammers must have taken control of her line.

After listing all the accurate charges, the man Gonzalez believed to be from her bank mentioned something about a nearly $8,000 charge made for a pornographic website.

"Absolutely not," Gonzalez said. "l didn't charge that."

The man on the phone kept telling Katie that she needed to get this straightened out before it got out that her account was linked to child porn, which, of course, it wasn't.

READ MORE: Outrageous and Chilling Scam Made Massachusetts Man Believe His Daughter Was in Jail

To eliminate the problem, the "fraud department" at the bank suggested a loophole of a double charge.

"He said someone (most likely the hackers) authorized the charge, so you can't dispute it. However, have you ever seen a double charge come through Amazon?  It's clearly a mistake. So when the bank sees it was charged twice they will label it as an error and dissolve both charges."

It might sound hard to believe but this phone call with the bank went on for three hours, as Katie decided whether or not to authorize the double charge. She drove to the bank with the "fraud department" still on the line and withdrew the $8,000. At the actual bank, the tellers sensed a scam, talked to Katie about it and eventually had her sign a waiver to withdraw the money.

She then brought the $8,000 to a Bitcoin machine and got a receipt for the second payment. Only when she had returned to the daycare, calmed down and talked it out with her employees did she realize she had been duped and that the double charge would not be reversed.

She had lost $8,000.

Gonzalez admitted she acted on emotion before her logic finally kicked in.

"In reality, I did all the wrong things,' she said. "In retrospect, this is all my fault, but when you're in a panic and you're not thinking straight, there is no logic."