Learning to avoid scams is a good investment

“We can work together to be smarter than the scammers,” emcee and Rep. Courtenay Sprunger, R-Kalispell, told a capacity crowd at Immanuel Living ready to learn about scams — and how to avoid them.

According to the commissioner of securities and insurance at the Office of the Montana State Auditor, $16.6 billion was lost in internet crimes nationwide in 2024, a 33% increase over 2023.  

That figure doesn’t include cryptocurrency scams — a term that sounds redundant to me even if it seems like everybody is dabbling in crypto these days, even President Donald Trump. He cofounded a crypto company in September 2024 and five months later — as president — took aim at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, seeking to weaken it.  

Created in 2010, the independent federal agency is tasked with consumer protection in the financial sector. 

The $16.6 billion in losses also doesn’t include unreported cases where victims may stay quiet out of shame or guilt. Still, reporting fraud may help counter it. Presenter Kaitlyn Wenzel, who works as a policy analyst with the commissioner in Helena, said, “We want to know about the latest scams.”  

About a quarter of victims are over 60 because, as Wenzel said, the scammers “go where the money is,” and older people may be more trusting, lonely or gullible than those who grew up online. 

Over two hours on a late October morning, we learned about the 73-year-old Bozeman resident who deposited $36,000 in a crypto ATM because a scammer said her computer was hacked. Sprunger said there are five such ATMs in the Kalispell area.

Then there was the Miles City Ponzi schemer who took $1.9 million from 18 elderly investors for a fictional house-flipping business called Faith Investors. 

Another Montanan spent all his retirement savings on someone he met through a dating website. Over six years he sent away about $4 million via wire transfers. They never met in person. Smooth typing sells; Montanans lost 59% more to romance scams in 2024 than in 2023.  

I tutted along with the rest of the attendees at each scenario until we got to the slide about “pig butchering.” In these schemes, a stranger contacts their would-be mark over social media or a dating website and eventually gains enough trust to lure the victim into a crypto-related scam.

It rang a bell.

Earlier this year I met a longtime friend for lunch who was swooning about the money to be made in the international art market. My friend had been approached on social media about their artwork and asked to provide NFTs (nonfungible tokens) that collectors began to trade like crazy.  

My friend worried about the difficulty of receiving the money from all the transactions and the taxes to pay on mounting profits. The more we talked, the crazier it sounded and when I suggested it seemed too good to be true and that nothing would come of this fantastical deal, my friend grew angry and waved a manila folder at me, saying, “I have the emails!” 

I almost laughed until I decided to choose friendship. I changed the subject. 

Several months later, I got the text: “You were right” — words I wish it hadn’t cost my friend $85,000 to write.  

Unrelatedly, my friend lost his job a few weeks ago. He could have used that cushion. 

As times get leaner and consumer protections fall away, it’ll be harder than ever to hang on to our money. 

Margaret E. Davis, executive director of the Northwest Montana History Museum, can be reached at [email protected].