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Nearly Entire Population Of California Under Flood Watches; Surge In Violent Crime Seizes Nation's Capitol; Financial Advice Columnist: I Was Scammed Out Of $50K. Aired 3:30-4p ET

Aired February 19, 2024 - 15:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

[15:30:00]

BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN HOST: Breaking news.

Police announcing an arrest in a deadly double shooting at the University of Colorado campus in Colorado Springs. The victims have been identified as 26-year-old Celie Montgomery and 24-year-old student Samuel Knopp. Both were found in a dorm room, and police say the deaths do not appear to be the result of a random attack.

We will let you know if officials release any information about the suspect or a possible motive -- Boris.

BORIS SANCHEZ, CNN HOST: This afternoon, we've been monitoring weather conditions in California, where almost the entire population is under flood alerts. Authorities are telling people to stay off the roads as the already soaked state gets slammed again with yet another storm.

Meteorologist Chad Myers has been monitoring it all. Chad, what's the latest in the forecast?

CHAD MYERS, CNN METEOROLOGIST: And that's really it, Boris. It has been slammed over and over and over, and the ground is saturated, in some spots super saturated, with even some landslides and mudslides out there. If this were just the first storm of the year and there was nothing else before this, we wouldn't even be on TV right now. Yes, it's going to rain.

But no, this is two to three inches on top of ground that will not absorb any. So yes, we have flood watches and even some flood warnings down from east of Santa Barbara earlier today, now toward the mountains just to the north of L.A. and Hollywood. That is the area that has seen so much rainfall.

I take you farther to the north. This is almost to Crescent City, almost to Oregon. And this is what the highway looked like. That's why they're saying stay off the roadway. We don't know if these mud areas.

Because you think about Colorado, and there's so much really granite mountains out there. The 14ers are all really rocks. Well, not every mountain in California is a rock. Some of it's dirt. And that dirt wants to get very saturated.

Just to give you an idea, month to date, Los Angeles has more than eight inches above normal for precipitation where they should be in a normal February, and it is still raining, and it's going to rain again tonight, and it is going to rain again tomorrow.

[15:35:05]

So yes, there's just one wave after another and there will be thunderstorms, too. Some of those storms could actually be rotating. Some of them could even contain the tornado. This is a pretty serious situation. Whether it's going to all pan out the way we think, we'll see but this is pretty big for California.

SANCHEZ: Chad Myers, thanks so much for keeping an eye on it for us.

Still ahead, How did a successful financial advice columnist get scammed out of $50,000 in cash. We're going to speak to someone who knows these kinds of tricks about how to make sure it doesn't happen to you.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[15:40:13]

KEILAR: There's fear in the nation's Capitol amid a rising crime wave that has taken over the district. Violent crimes robberies and carjackings are all surging astronomically and police say many of these crimes are being committed by kids.

CNN's Gabe Cohen is here with a closer look at them. Gabe, how bad is this youth crime issue here in DC?

GABE COHEN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, Brianna, the crime stats paint a really alarming picture -- if we can put those up. D.C. has been dealing with this general violent crime surge. It was up 39 percent last year. Robberies up 67 percent and carjackings nearly doubled in D.C. in 2023.

But what's really caught my eyes in the data is how many kids are caught up in this. Seventy-six percent of armed carjacking arrests last year were minors under 18 years old. Sixty-five percent of robbery arrests were kids.

And it has sparked a lot of fear because we are seeing videos every week of people being carjacked or mugged in different neighborhoods of the district. And in many cases, it's being done by groups of people. Some of them are kids.

Just last week, D.C. police arrested a 14-year-old who they say was part of a group that was carjacking rideshare drivers at gunpoint. Brianna, 14-years-old, not old enough to have a learner's permit, and yet participating in carjacking, according to police.

And I've heard from a ton of people across D.C., the nation's capital, who are now actively changing their own behavior, trying to stay safe, given how seemingly brazen and random a lot of these attacks have felt.

KEILAR: And I know that you actually spoke to some of the most at-risk kids in the community about what is fueling this.

COHEN: Yes, we wanted to hear directly from some of those kids about what is causing this crisis. So we actually went to court with a group of boys who were there in the gallery to see their 17-year-old friend get sentenced for attempted robbery.

They were there with a mentor who's been working with them for the past year or so, since another friend of theirs was killed, just trying to keep things from escalating. And I asked them about what is causing this and what kids are saying. Take a listen. Here's what one of them told me.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

COHEN: What do they say when it comes to carjacking or robbery? What are kids saying about it?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: They really don't think none, because all they think they're doing is getting a car. They don't see the impact it do to other people.

COHEN: They think it's not a big deal.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yeah, they think it's not a big deal.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

COHEN (on camera): And quite a few people echoed that, Brianna, that a lot of kids don't think there are serious consequences for these crimes.

And local leaders here have faced a lot of criticism for a drop in arrests and prosecutions and what some consider lenient laws giving kids a slap on the wrist. And now officials here are taking some tough-on-crime measures to address this crisis. But no doubt the issues clearly run deeper, Brianna.

And we get into a lot more in our full story, which is set to air next hour in "THE LEAD" with Jake Tapper.

KEILAR: All right, Gabe, really looking forward to that. Thank you so much.

SANCHEZ: A financial advice columnist recently went viral for her personal story titled, "The Day I Put $50,000 in a Shoebox and Handed It to a Stranger." New York Magazine's Charlotte Cowles recounts how she got a call from crooks spinning an elaborate scam that she totally fell for.

KEILAR: Yes, and it really was quite elaborate. She says that it started with a caller posing as an Amazon employee who convinced her that she was a victim of identity fraud. And then she spoke to someone pretending to be from the Federal Trade Commission, followed by a person claiming to be a CIA investigator who got her to withdraw the $50,000 that she had in her savings account and then hand it over for safekeeping. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CHARLOTTE COWLES, COLUMNIST, THE CUT: I wanted to tell this story because there really is no stereotypical scam victim. And I know this from my own personal experience, obviously. But also the hundreds of emails that I've received from other people since this story came out, other financial professionals, they are doctors, they are lawyers, they are government employees. There are people of all walks of life who this happens to. And this is also backed up by data and research that's done on scam victims. There really is no one type of person who's vulnerable.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KEILAR: Well, this story certainly has people talking. So we're going to talk about it now with financial therapist Lindsay Bryan-Podvin.

Lindsay, what did you think when you heard Charlotte's story? She is, after all, a financial advice columnist, a pretty savvy person by all accounts. And yet she fell for this scam.

LINDSAY BRYAN-PODVIN, FINANCIAL THERAPIST: Yes, I think, Brianna, with Charlotte sharing her story, the first thing I thought is this is an incredibly brave person to come forward and to name what happened, especially given the line of work that she's in. And as she shared, to normalize and validate that this can happen to anyone, regardless of your level of education or however savvy you think you are regarding scams.

[15:45:15]

SANCHEZ: Part of the reason, Lindsay, that it was successful is that these scammers knew very specific personal information about her. They exploited it. This is actually what she told CNN about the way that this went down.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

COWLES: It unfolded very gradually and incrementally over five hours on the phone.

And I think that what these people do is they're very good at targeting people, figuring out their one specific vulnerability. Everyone has one, at least, and then exploiting that. And for me, it was my family.

And they had very intimate details about me, about my family members. They knew where I lived. They knew the last four digits of my social security number. They knew about my son. And it was terrifying.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SANCHEZ: How do scammers access that kind of sensitive information? I'm assuming it's somewhere out there on the internet.

BRYAN-PODVIN: It is somewhere out on the internet, Boris. A lot of this information is available about most of us. But what she's specifically talking about regarding her social security number, not as much the name of her child or her address, is often sold on the dark web, which sounds like it's something out of a sci-fi movie.

But these scammers are incredibly adept at finding this information and using it to leverage a person and make them much more vulnerable than they might be, right? They're triggering their nervous system. They're triggering their fight or flight. And they're pressing on their tender pain points that make them more susceptible to this.

KEILAR: What are the telltale signs of a call or an email or a text being part of a scam?

BRYAN-PODVIN: Well, I think that's exactly it, Brianna, is we have to be really cognizant that there are no one red flag or one group of red flags that happen in all of these cases. These scammers are incredibly smart, and they change up their strategy time and time again.

As Charlotte shared in her piece, when she took a step back, as soon as she handed over that box and started talking to others about it, she realized pretty quickly that it was a scam. But in that moment, they are pressing on all of your pain points to make it really frightening.

Now, in hindsight, she said some of the things that were red flags were things like high-level government agencies calling me. Other red flags were things like checking with my credit bureau, checking with my bank, and saying, like, there actually wasn't an identity theft. Actually, nobody had opened cards in your name.

So there were some red flags that she saw in retrospect, but in the moment, it can be really frightening.

SANCHEZ: Yes, no question about that. Lindsay, Bryan-Podvin, thanks so much for the time.

BRYAN-PODVIN: Thank you so much for having me.

SANCHEZ: Of course.

Still ahead, it is President's Day, and a new survey is ranking the top presidents in U.S. history named by political scientists. We're going to show you who's number one and who came in last.

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[15:52:34]

SANCHEZ: In fewer than nine months, voters are going to head to the polls and pick the next president of the United States. The latest polls show a close race between the two frontrunners, Joe Biden and Donald Trump, in a hypothetical rematch. But how do they rate among the other commanders-in-chief, those who came before them?

For the third time in the past decade, the Presidential Greatness Project surveyed the nation's top academics to rank U.S. presidents from best to worst.

CNN's Harry Enten joins us now on this President's Day to break down the results. So, Harry, what conclusions did they come to?

HARRY ENTEN, CNN SENIOR DATA REPORTER: Yes, and a big surprise to everybody. Academics don't like a Republican president than Donald Trump. Out of 45 presidents, he ranked last. He ranked last. He ranked 45th on the list. Joe Biden ranked a little bit better than Donald Trump did. He ranked, in fact, 14th, which is not too bad.

But, you know, again, not much of a surprise given that when I first started here, one of the first projects I did was looking into these rankings. And Donald Trump back then ranked 44th out of 44. Now he's 45th out of 45.

And again, it's not much of a surprise to me that the historians ranked Biden, excuse me, like Donald Trump so low because the fact is academics overall tend to be more Democratic. You can see this University of New Hampshire and Dartmouth College, of course, where I went to school. Donald Trump got very low percentage of the vote in the general election. But even among Republicans in the Republican primary this past time around, Joe Biden, excuse me, Donald Trump did quite poorly. So not much of a surprise to me that Trump did so poorly in these rankings.

SANCHEZ: So, Harry, who took number one?

ENTEN: Not much of a surprise. We consistently have a one, two, three.

That's very similar to this. But number one in your rankings is the 16th president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln. Number two, FDR. Number three, George Washington. I was a little surprised. I might have thought George Washington would be a little bit higher.

But I will note it's not just that these top three that we have. I also like to look at movers over time. And, you know, we know that these rankings can change.

So if you look back in 1962, someone like Ulysses S. Grant was 30th. Now he's up to 17th. Someone like Andrew Johnson was 23rd ahead of Grant back in 62. Now he's 43rd.

So these things can change as historians put things into perspective.

[15:55:00]

But I'm not really much of a surprise to me that someone like Andrew Johnson, who really did not do particularly good after the Civil War, has fallen in the rankings.

We'll just have to wait and see where Donald Trump is in 20, 30, 40 years down the road. Because the fact is, historians can change their minds.

SANCHEZ: I'm still waiting to see William Henry Harrison have his day. A short but sweet presidency of 30 days. The shortest ever. And yet he's frowned upon by history.

ENTEN: You know what? The fact is, 30 days, 39 days, whatever number it was, not quite nearly enough. But, you know, in our hearts, Boris, he'll always be the best president to serve only about a month.

SANCHEZ: That's about right. Harry Enten, thanks for being with us. We'll be right back. Stay with NEWS CENTRAL.

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[16:00:06]

SANCHEZ: Usually first graders are taught how to read and write, but there's a town in Sweden that's teaching them a different life skill, how to survive an icy lake. Fully clothed students are taking the plunge while attached to a rope, and their big objective is to find a way to escape.

KEILAR: That's right. It's terrifying. But imagine this happens. Deadly accidents common in Sweden, where people fall through the ice where they're skating or ice fishing. So students are taught how to get out in case it ever happens to them. Makes sense.

SANCHEZ: Brilliant. Are they taught how to assemble Ikea furniture? Because I feel like that is a life skill in Sweden that would be essential.

KEILAR: That's our skill. Boris.

"THE LEAD" with Jake Tapper starts right now.