Every Scam is a Magic Trick. The Key is Watching the Other Hand

Cybercrime losses hit $21B last year. Five times what they were in 2020.

A good magician never hides the move. They show you both hands the whole time. They just make sure you are watching the wrong one. That is the entire job of a modern scam. To get you looking somewhere else while you hand over the money yourself.

The New York Times reported this week that the surge in fraud has turned tellers into something closer to detectives. The example: a Chase teller in Scarsdale realized an 81-year-old customer was being walked through a scam by someone claiming to work at Chase, offering to move her money somewhere “safe.” The teller saw the trick. She stopped it at the counter.

So this week, the three moves every scam runs, and the people learning to call them.

Three Moves, Every Time

The key: keep them talking, keep them rushed

A magician fills the silence so you never stop to think. A scam does the same with a clock. Act now, the account closes today, the agent is waiting on the line. Nearly two-thirds of scam victims pay within 24 hours of first contact. The clock is doing the work.

PYMNTS Intelligence and Block, Financial Scams and Consumer Trust, November 2025.

The misdirection: point at a fake threat

“This is your fraud team. Someone is draining your account.” Now the mark is staring at a danger that does not exist, while the real move, their own money going out the door, happens in the open. Unauthorized-party fraud now makes up 71% of incidents and losses, a clear shift toward account takeover and getting the customer to move the money themselves.

PYMNTS Intelligence and Block, 2025 State of Fraud and Financial Crime in the U.S.

The force: make them think it was their idea

The best trick ends with the mark sure they chose the card. “Move your savings to a protected account.” The 81-year-old in Scarsdale was not being robbed in her mind. She was being helped. That is the force, and it is why willing, deliberate customers walk their own funds into a scammer’s hands.

The setup

Every one of these moves depends on one thing: the mark trusting the stranger more than they trust their own institution. Scammers spend the whole call lowering your trust in your own institution and raising it in themselves. Reverse those two and the trick falls apart.

The Trick Only Works on a Room That Hasn’t Seen It.

JPMorgan went looking for why people fall for the pitch and hired a behavioral scientist, Elizabeth Huppert, to study recorded calls between customers and scammers. Her read on the job:

“I’m trying to lower the trust in the scammer. I’m trying to elevate the trust in us.”

Chase and others now run frontline staff through a 30-minute AARP BankSafe course built to spot exactly these moves.

Here is the part that matters for your institution. A magician fools a room because no one in it has seen the gimmick before. Your account holder is seeing this trick for the first time this morning. The network has seen it a thousand times. The “new” move running at your counter today already ran at another institution last week.

A consortium screen is the one audience member who already knows how the trick ends.

Takeaway

The money now leaves with the customer’s own hand, so stopping it after the transaction is too late. The win is earlier: the frontline read that something is off, backed by shared intelligence that has already seen the pattern somewhere else. Human eyes catch the tell. The network confirms it before the funds move.

Also on the Bill

A few more from this week’s reporting worth keeping in view:

• Speak up and the odds flip. 53% of scam victims who told their institution recovered most or all of their money. Among those who said nothing, only 12% did.
• Most people do report. 77% of victims brought it to their institution, which makes the frontline conversation the single biggest recovery lever you have.
• Training is moving frontline staff from cashier to detective. The AARP BankSafe course Chase adopted takes 30 minutes and is built around recognizing the moves above.

Final Thoughts

Every magic trick relies on one thing the audience never does: compare notes. The second someone in the crowd has seen the move before and says it out loud, the spell breaks.

Fraud runs on the same secret. It works because the mark is alone with the scammer, and because your institution is often seeing the move for the first time too.

That is the whole case for sharing fraud intelligence. The teller in Scarsdale caught one trick with one sharp read. A network catches it for everyone, because somewhere out there, a member of the audience has already seen exactly how it ends.

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