CBS News' Matt Gutman Nearly Fell for a Bank Scam: The Red Flag That Saved Him

A CBS News correspondent who has spent years reporting on fraud has revealed he came within moments of emptying his bank account for scammers, stopped only by one instruction from the caller that gave the con away.

Matt Gutman, the network's 48-year-old chief correspondent, described the near-miss in a video posted to X and Instagram on 10 July, filmed after he left a Bank of America branch in Los Angeles. 'I'm not as savvy as I think I am,' he said, calling it a 'very scary experience'.

The call had come an hour earlier. A woman said she was from Bank of America's fraud protection department, and she had a name, a badge ID, and a detailed grasp of his accounts.

'This person gave me a name, they gave me a badge ID,' Gutman said. 'They seemed to know so much about me, about my bank account.' What made it convincing, he said, was that the caller cited genuine recent activity on a family account. 'We went through all the accounts, and we actually had some suspicious activity recently in my daughter's account,' he recalled.

The woman said two fraudsters were working inside his branch under aliases, which she named, and that catching them required his help. 'What we need you to do in order to intercept these fraudsters is to go into the bank and withdraw everything from your bank account,' Gutman said he was told. The cash, she claimed, would 'trigger the fraudsters into action' so they could be caught.

The next condition was the one that stopped him. Gutman was told to say nothing to the tellers, because staff at the branch might be working with the criminals.

'I go to the teller, and I start doing the thing, and I'm like, there is no way that this is possibly real, that anybody would use a regular civilian for a sting operation at a bank,' he said. He left without withdrawing a penny.

Had he gone ahead, Gutman said, the danger went beyond a drained account. He would have left a branch the scammers already knew, carrying thousands of dollars in cash. 'And then they either rob your car or they rob you,' he said. He thanked Los Angeles police and Bank of America staff for helping him.

The Bank Scam That Investigators Call Courier Fraud

What Gutman described has a name in law enforcement: courier fraud. Criminals pose as bank or government officials, warn a target that their money is at risk, and steer them into withdrawing cash or buying gold, which is then collected in person. The FBI has warned that such schemes increasingly end with a courier pickup, with scammers supplying a badge number or code to look official.

The sums involved are substantial. Americans reported losing $12.5 billion (£9.3 billion) to fraud in 2024, up 25 per cent on the previous year, according to the Federal Trade Commission, with imposter scams accounting for $2.95 billion (£2.2 billion) of that. The agency notes that cash handed to impersonators is among the hardest to recover.

How to Spot a Bank Scam Phone Call

British readers face the same playbook. City of London Police, the national lead force for fraud, logged 1,797 courier fraud reports in a single financial year, with victims losing more than £21 million ($28 million), an average of about £12,000 ($16,100) each.

Older people are hit hardest. In July 2025, officers launched a crackdown in London's Hatton Garden, where victims had been pushed into buying gold for collection.

The guidance is consistent on both sides of the Atlantic. A genuine bank or police force will never call and ask you to withdraw cash, move money to a 'safe account' or hand a card to a courier.

'The first thing we should have done was hung up and called the number on the back of the card. We didn't think about it,' Gutman wrote in a follow-up post, adding that no real bank asks a customer to pull money out of an account, and that anyone demanding secrecy should be treated as a fraud.

'Some of these scams are incredibly sophisticated,' Gutman said. 'I'm just blown away by how good that person was.'