Greg's Corner

Bank scam targets gig economy workers

By Greg Collier

For better or worse, millions of people have turned to work in the gig economy either as their primary income or as a secondary source of revenue. The gig economy is where people work for non-traditional companies as independent contractors. For example, if you drive for Uber or Lyft, or deliver for Grubhub or DoorDash, you’re part of the gig economy. Working as an independent contractor for any one of these types of companies already comes with its own pitfalls. Many say that the companies are already taking advantage of their workers by removing protections that many traditional jobs have. If that wasn’t bad enough, scammers are now targeting gig workers’ bank accounts.

A DoorDash driver from North Carolina was recently a victim of this scam, where he ended up losing $1,000. While making his rounds, he received a phone call from someone claiming to be from DoorDash. They told him to pull over somewhere safe and then said that the driver’s DoorDash account had been compromised. The scammers were even able to give him details from his own account. The scammers then instructed the man that they were going to send him an authorization code to save his account. All he had to do was tell them the code, which the driver did. When he went to get his payment from his DoorDash account, he discovered that the scammers had directed his payment away from his bank account and into theirs.

Authorization codes are usually sent to customers of whatever service if they need to make a change to their account. This is part of what’s known as two-factor authentication. If someone is claiming to be a representative of that company, they won’t need an authorization code to make changes or protect your account, as they already have your information. This affects everyone too, not just gig workers, as many of the services we rely on every day require authorization codes to access them.