This Tampa man nearly lost $15K in a sophisticated ‘cash bag’ scam — until 1 dead giveaway stopped him cold. Learn how to spot this fraud yourself

But as he shared with Tampa Bay 28’s investigative team, something didn’t feel right.

The scammers he’d been speaking with on the phone told him to keep his phone turned on so they could hear what he said when he was inside the bank. (1)

Harmon did as he was told, but when the teller passed him a withdrawal slip, he did something the scammers couldn’t hear. He turned the slip over and wrote: “I think I’m being scammed.”

The teller called for the bank manager, who instructed Harmon to turn off his phone immediately.

Harmon had a narrow escape and empathizes with anyone who gets taken in. That’s why he’s sharing his story.

“I just think we need to be sharing information because there’s so much crazy stuff going on right now,” he said.

Here’s how he got hooked in the first place and how to protect yourself from cash bag scams.

How the ‘cash bag scam’ works

It starts with a text or notification, typically asking you to confirm or deny an unusual charge to your bank account. In Harmon’s case, the con artists sent a text asking if he had made a $2,800 charge at Best Buy. That’s the bait.

If you reply (whether your reply is ‘yes’ or ‘no’), they’ve already hooked you.

They follow up with a phone call, claiming to be a bank rep — as they did in Harmon’s case. To reinforce their cover story, they read you a list of your actual financial transactions.

How do they know? Scammers can use your SIN number (acquired on the Dark Web) and hack into phone-based bank systems to pull a list of your transactions, as they did with Harmon.

“Never before has a scammer been able to tell me exactly what my banking history was,” Harmon said.

This adds a sense of legitimacy to the criminals’ storyline.

“I was 100% sure it was them,” Harmon said.

Once scammers gain a target’s trust, they create a false sense of urgency and fear.

They will tell a victim that their bank account is compromised and the bank needs their help to protect it.

Sadly, the “protection” is actually where victims endanger their savings, as they are told to withdraw thousands of their hard-earned dollars in cash and hand it over to scammers or send it to fraudsters via prepaid cards or a cryptocurrency. After the money is sent out, recovery is unlikely.

Falling for such a con job is more common than you might think. Roger Grimes, who works for the cybersecurity company KnowBe4, said his own bank manager recently informed him that their branch bank stopped two to three scams a day.

Florida Bankers Association president Kathy Kraninger told Tampa Bay 28 that banks are doing all they can to teach customers and staff how to recognize increasingly sophisticated scams nationwide.

As of July 2025, 73% of U.S. adults had experienced some kind of online scam or attack, according to the Pew Research Center. (2)

“This is organized crime now,” Kraninger said. “This is not individual, one-off scammers.”

It’s a multi-billion dollar criminal enterprise.

In 2024, Americans lost $12.5 billion to fraud, a 25% increase over 2023, according to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).

How to protect yourself from this common scam

Don’t share any financial details with people you don’t know.