Scam text, frozen Venmo, and $5,000 gone — how Solve It 7 got it back

The message looked legitimate and urgent, but following its instructions set off a chain of costly clicks for Karen Caplan.

The text claimed there was a problem with a credit card charge and instructed her to call a number for help.

“When we called the number to rectify it, he walked us through all this rigmarole of what we had to do. I was distracted, and before we knew what we were doing, we had transferred all this money out from our accounts,” said Caplan.

In minutes, nearly $5,000 disappeared from Caplan’s Venmo account.

“When we kind of realized what had happened and we contacted our bank, we noticed that, in fact, the money had been withdrawn from our accounts,” she said.

Caplan’s bank put the money back into her account, but her Venmo account was still frozen.

“It was, you kn