The scam here was threats through external calls, pretending to be authoritative agencies (FTC, CIA). The scam would have been prevented if the person had actively sought contact to those agencies to validate the claims of the callers.
Never trust someone who calls you with extreme, urgent bad news. Use validated, known means of contact for whoever they pretend to represent and validate.
Many years ago I experienced a "false negative" event like this: two different people called me claiming to be FBI agents. Of course I laughed and hung up. A couple of weeks later a car pulls into my driveway, two dudes wearing mirrored sunglasses get out, introduce themselves as FBI agents. I ask them to show me credentials, which they do. Lesson: you can just hang up on all calls purporting to be from federal agencies. They will show up in your front yard if they really need to talk to you.
How many people know what [insert federal agency] credentials look like?
I have a friend who is one of the 2k IRS Criminal Investigation Division agents in the entire country. He's full-blown armed federal agent a la FBI, etc.
He tells me it's very common that when he goes out to do an "interview" people say he's not real and they're calling the police, slamming the door in his face.
The local cops show up, check him out, and then go back to the door with him. In his area he (of course) personally knows many local cops and they'll show up laughing "Oh another one, huh?". It doesn't bother him at all and I seriously doubt a scammer/impersonator would stand around waiting for the police to show up and then have the gall to try to con /them/.
Additionally, they have undercover vehicles (of course) but when he goes out for interviews like this it's in the classic "Oh yeah that's a cop car" vehicle with US Government license plates.
It's such a weird read. She even called out the possibility of spoofing calls and how law enforcement never asks for money. So she was well aware. Yet she fell for all of it without being able to explain why.
I've refused to give away basic ip addresses to the police because they couldn't verify their identity and she handed over her life savings to a stranger in an unmarked car.
I wish she at least could explain her reasoning afterwards. Her husband's disappointment must be immense and that's a tricky thing to mend.
Sounds like a lot of manipulation techniques described in this book being used:
A little treatise on manipulation for honest people
Book by Jean-Léon Beauvois
I had a psych teacher who shared an anecdote of how she spent a few 100 on Venetian glassware key-rings to gift everyone due to a combination of those techniques, despite knowing and teaching them for years. Knowing something is manipulation and how it works doesn’t make one immune to it. It made no sense to the teacher why she fell for it. She couldn’t really explain it either, except for that is how the techniques work. It uses how your brain functions to shortcut your ability to think rationally, and get you to do something you normally wouldn’t, and that seems obvious in hindsight. You could compare it to hacking someone’s thoughts, except there’s no way to fix vulnerabilities with a software update.
Never trust someone who calls you with extreme, urgent bad news. Use validated, known means of contact for whoever they pretend to represent and validate.