Teresa Rogg stood by the kitchen counter in her Quincy home last summer with a phone pressed to her ear, wrapping stacks of $100 bills in tin foil. She then sealed the money in a box, walked out to her yard, and waited for a courier, just as the woman on the phone had instructed.
The man who appeared from the side street remained silent, save for a single word — a passcode. “Blessings,” he said.
“That’s how I knew to hand over the box,” she recalled.
This kind of pickup, where a stranger would arrive to retrieve her money then immediately disappear, happened four times over the course of two months, Rogg said.
Over those two months, with each pickup, Rogg was unwittingly contributing to her own financial undoing, swept into a growing wave of increasingly elaborate and professionalized tech support scams that has surged across Massachusetts.
The reported losses from such scams in the state have increased exponentially from less than $1.2 million in 2019 to more than $50 million last year, according to a Globe analysis of FBI data. Those losses put the state in second nationally on a per capita basis, behind only California.
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Rogg lost the entire balance of her retirement account of about $140,000. The scammers’ hold only broke when her sister-in-law, who works in the banking industry, convinced her she was being conned.
“It was like, ‘Oh my God, what have I done?’ ” Rogg, 74, said.
It all started with a seemingly ordinary security pop-up that appeared as she was browsing on her computer last year. The message warned her to call a help line, and when she did, scammers told her that a suspicious gambling withdrawal had been detected on her account. They told her to withdraw her retirement savings and hand it over to couriers to keep it safe.
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“This is a race to the bottom,” said Steve Baker, a retired director of the Midwest regional office of the Federal Trade Commission, which monitors and investigates fraud cases.
Tech support scams, though commonplace for decades, have evolved considerably in recent years, he said, with each new iteration more aggressive and effective than the last. One of the most troubling recent innovations has been the growing use of in-person couriers to collect victims’ cash quickly while leaving little digital footprint.
A key reason that tech scams generally have grown so dramatically is that scammers have learned how to create highly tailored cons based on information they steal from victims, often convincing them to turn over their entire life savings.
The FBI has even given these new, more aggressive scams a chilling name: “phantom hacker” scams, because they typically begin with a pop-up or email warning users that they’ve been hacked, even though no real hacker exists.
Such warnings prompt victims to get on the phone, at which point scammers convince them to hand over full access to their computer under the guise of fixing the security breach. After getting access, phantom hackers go well beyond the traditional scam playbook. They gather enough information, such as account details and personal data, to stitch together a full-scale con, often involving people pretending to be government officials.
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In Rogg’s case, the scammers collected enough information to send her a series of personalized letters, purporting to be from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, a federal agency insuring banks. The letters warned that she had to withdraw money out of her retirement account before hackers stole it.
“They convince [victims] that they are about to be arrested, and that there’s something wrong with their accounts,” said Will Maxon, an assistant director of marketing practices at the FTC. “It can go on for weeks and weeks — maybe months.”
It wasn’t always so sophisticated.
Seven years ago, when Dennis Hohengasser, who lives in Taunton, was scammed, he said it also began with a pop-up message claiming to be from Microsoft.
When he called the number on the message, the scammers convinced him to install a bogus antivirus program, charging him just $100 a year.
Nowadays, such a small loss sounds almost merciful. “It’s getting worse,” he said.
Tech support scammers have also learned to specifically target older adults, who often lack confidence or familiarity with technology, said Mike McCall, a retired FBI agent who now teaches forensic accounting at several colleges, including Boston College.
Some of McCall’s younger students don’t know how to write by hand, but are very tech savvy, he said. “But elderly folks? They don’t always know how to type — they’re much more vulnerable.”
The data bear that out. Last year, Massachusetts victims over the age of 60 lost nearly $100 million to cyber scams generally, compared to less than $8 million for people under 30.
In the past, tech support scams were also limited by logistics. It used to be difficult for scammers to move large sums of money overseas quickly without alerting financial brokers or the authorities. But with the rise of cryptocurrency and the use of in-person cash couriers, scammers have found new ways to bypass traditional financial guardrails, according to Baker, the former FTC Midwest regional director.
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He’s been particularly concerned by the rise of mail couriers to pick up scammed funds.
“It’s a damn tidal wave,” he said. “For the people who are showing up and collecting it, it’s a risk. But they clearly have done a risk calculus and figured out that it’s worthwhile.”
One of the reasons that money couriers have grown in popularity is that they leave no direct digital trail tying the cash back to the scam ringleaders. But the couriers themselves face all sorts of risks.
In Ohio last year, an elderly man shot and killed an Uber driver after wrongly believing that she was part of a scam against him. Months later, a courier in Greenwich, Conn., was charged with conspiracy to commit larceny and attempted larceny after he tried to pick up cash at the home of a 74-year-old who was conned out of nearly $500,000.
Victims of other schemes, such as romance scams or fake job offers, are also sometimes manipulated into acting as money mules. In those cases, victims don’t just lose their own money. They can become entangled in separate criminal investigations as accomplices, unwitting or otherwise.
After Rogg in Quincy realized she was being duped, she was determined not to let it go any further.
When Rogg got another call to arrange a cash pickup last September, she and the Quincy police were ready.
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Undercover officers stationed themselves at every access point to her yard, she recalled. Instead of wrapping stacks of hundred-dollar bills in tin foil, she packed the box with shredded newspaper.
Then, as she had done so many times before, Rogg walked out and waited for a courier. Just as the woman on the phone promised, a young man soon approached.
“Blessings,” he said.
This time, after Rogg handed over the box, the police moved in, she said. They trailed the courier and his driver, and arrested them both. They were later identified as two Chinese nationals, Shaoquan Liu, 27, and Shiwang Ning, 33, court records show.
Once the police told Rogg that the men had been taken into custody, she made one last call to the scammer behind the con.
“I called her back and said, ‘You’ve got all the money you’re getting from me,’” she said. “ ‘You’re not scamming me anymore.’ ”
Then, for the last time, she hung up.
Scooty Nickerson can be reached at scooty.nickerson@globe.com.