CBS News journalist Matt Gutman spoke on the social network X (formerly Twitter) about how he almost became a victim of scammers who convincingly portrayed Bank of America employees over the phone. The attackers demanded that a man at a nearby branch withdraw all his money from his account and thereby help catch the people who allegedly tried to do it for him.
As Gatman noted, at first he was forced to trust the scammers by certain details about his personality and accounts that they mentioned in the conversation. The journalist’s interlocutor also introduced himself by name and gave a fictitious number of his Bank of America employee ID.
The reporter realized his mistake only after arriving at the branch and talking to a real employee. He noted that he already had doubts about why the false officers turned to ordinary clients, and not law enforcement officers, for help in catching the scammers. According to Gutman, the bank explained that the scammers expected him to leave the office with thousands of dollars in cash, and they would steal the money, knowing where he was.
I just got SCAMMED: a remarkably sophisticated phone scam that nearly had me pull the entire entirety of funds out of one bank account. Watch to see how it unfolded. And how dangerous it might possibly have been.
Huge shout out to the @lapdhq and the folks at the @bankofamerica… pic.twitter.com/y17xohZcBz
— Matt Gutman (@CBSMATTGUTMAN) July 10, 2026
As Tulane University (Louisiana) cybersecurity professor Joshua Copeland noted in an interview with Moneywise, the “targeted” fraud method that Gutman was subjected to is becoming more widespread compared to mass calls. As he explained, the information necessary for such productions gets to the attackers both from open sources, such as social networks, and from stolen databases.
The founder of the Incode platform, which provides biometric identification services, Ricardo Ampere added in a comment to the same media that fraudsters have recently begun to use artificial intelligence (AI) to search and compile this information.
“The result of this is that scams are becoming many times more effective than even two or three years ago,” Ampere emphasized.
