The host of MTV’s Catfish posted a viral video on TikTok, sharing a PSA about a sophisticated Venmo scam. In the video, she urged viewers to trust their instincts.
Kamie Crawford (@kamiecrawford) gained more than 286,000 views and 28,000 likes on her video by Thursday evening.
In her video, Crawford said she made her video to spread awareness because, “If this can happen to me, and I’m literally the host of Catfish, this can happen to anyone so listen up.”
Crawford explained she got scammed while she was in Vegas for an Usher concert.
“Yes, the backstory is important,” she added. She explained that her and her friends were having cocktails by the pool when she received a call from a random number.
“I get spam calls all the time and at this rate I usually just pick up and cuss them out and then hang up, but this time it said it was from Venmo,” Crawford said.
She said she knew in the back of her mind that it was probably a scam, but the call said they noticed fraudulent activity on her Venmo account.
“I’m like getting ready for them to patch me into somebody from somewhere who is clearly a scammer so that I can cuss them out,” she added. But before she gets transferred, she receives a text message asking to verify a code to prove her identity on her Venmo account.
When she sees the text message, she notices that it came from Venmo’s phone number. Crawford showed a screenshot of her text message conversation with the Venmo phone number in her video. The previous texts that she received were all for her former payments. “All these are from Catfish,” she said, “this is the number that they use to text me from.”
She reads the text message that Venmo sent her of the confirmation code. “I don’t know if it was the drinks that I had or the fact that I got a real text message from Venmo’s real number, but I’m thinking like oh, this has to be Venmo,” she said.
Crawford sent the code to the number. “And guess what happened?” she asked. Next Crawford said something told her to go look at her Venmo account just to make sure everything was okay.
@kamiecrawford #stitch with @Katie | The.Self.Defense.Girl Storytime of how I recently got scammed on Venmo! PLEASE BEWARE 🚨 #spoofing #scammeralert #storytime #greenscreen #catfish ♬ original sound – Kamie Crawford
“Tell me why they changed my name to Sherwin Frederick,” she said showing a screenshot of what her Venmo account had been changed to.
Then she noticed that the scammers changed her bank account information to their own personal bank information. “Which is very bold by the way because like, don’t you think that we can find you like that?” she adds.
Crawford’s Venmo account showed that the scammers did an instant transfer of $1,486.85 from her wallet to their bank account. “So they basically just drained my sh*t and went and transferred it into their account,” she explained.
Next, she said she called Venmo to give them all the information, and they explained to her that you should never receive a call from Venmo. “Yeah but you guys texted me, or whoever this person is, texted me from your number,” she said she responded.
Crawford said the Venmo representative asked for a screenshot of the texts and was also very confused when realizing it was the correct number for Venmo. She said they “seemed a little surprised and weirded out by what happened.”
After going through the long process of getting her account back, Crawford said Venmo transferred her all of the money back.
She told viewers that even though she liked Venmo for a while, she is not going to use the app anymore.
“But there’s really no safe place anymore because now people are spoofing calls from your bank,” she added.
Crawford advised that it’s better to be safe than sorry. She suggested going in person to your bank or at least calling them yourself is the smartest way to make sure you’re speaking with the right people.
“Now people are calling you and it’s showing up as your bank’s number, but it’s not your bank,” she added.
The Daily Dot reached out to Crawford via TikTok direct message.
Viewer Julie Kullberg Raetz (@jkraetz) joked in the comment section of Crawford’s video, “This season on Catfish, the search for Sherwin Frederick.”