I went to Target today to pick up a couple things and a group of young men (4-5) approached me when I was heading to my car. They said they were fundraising for their dead cousin's family through some kind of charitable organization and the state of (state right next to where I live). I said I could give them $20 and they said that's great, they're only taking electronic donations because the state can't track cash donations.
They asked me to go to square.com on my phone so they could charge the card I just handed them. Me not thinking too hard about it just figured that they were a family and not an business unit so they didn't have access to the normal square reader or anything like that. After I handed them my phone they asked me to record my donation information on a sheet of paper. They had me write my first and last name, my "donation" amount, and my email. After I finished up with that one of them handed me another sheet of paper to record the SAME information. I thought that was weird too but figured you know, states like their documentation.
At some point I remember getting a notification on my watch saying that $20.00 had been charged to my account and though "oh that's chill". When they gave me my phone and my card back I went on my merry way, but I wanted to log into my banking app real quick to verify that the charge came from a legitimate place. I found that they had uninstalled the banking app from my phone, and that's when I knew I fucked up.
I reinstalled the app but it locked me out from too many recently failed sign on attempts. It let me log into browser for whatever reason and that's when I saw what they had really been up to. There were 6 different $1,500 charges that were pending on my account. I called the credit card company and got those disputed immediately and get the card cancelled. Then I went back to Target to see if they were still there so I could call the cops. They were gone of course and the cops were already on the scene.
I realized during this conversation that the whole point of the scam was to have my phone and credit card at the same time so that they could make those charges. The paperwork that they had me do was just there to distract me so I wouldn't notice whatever they were doing with my phone. I don't think they even signed into an account on square. I think they just fucked up my banking access, opened up my email to approve the charge and gave me my stuff back after that. There was another victim there and she said they made her do even more paperwork (probably because she was writing faster).
If you're going to practice parking lot generosity, stick to cash only because even if you get scammed out of cash there's not painful follow-up :(.
How cooked am I? Do you all think they were just after the cash from the fraudulent charges or is this perhaps a more complicated phishing scheme? I did a bunch of stuff to protect myself afterwards. I reported the scam to the FTC.