Seniors and Scams
Help Seniors Avoid Scams
It’s something we hear about all the time in the media and yet it continues to be a serious issue for our senior population. Yet with all the publicity, senior-targeted scams are still a huge problem. Billions of dollars are stolen from seniors every year! It has a lot to do with the fact that elderly targets may be lonely, willing to listen and are usually more trusting than younger individuals.
There are so many different types of scams out there. It seems like the one I’ve heard about the most about is where a person meets someone online and the next thing you know they’ve sent their life savings to this person, who usually resides in a foreign country. The con plays on the target’s emotions, professing the con’s love for the target and asking for financial assistance. They could be asking for money to help with medical issues, surgery or saying they’ve lost their job and can’t pay the bills or feed their children. Love is a very powerful emotion and unfortunately can be used as a weapon to take advantage of our senior population. Everyone wants to be loved and it’s in our hearts to want to help others. These con artists take advantage of this! There are so many other types of scams that take place such as telephone scams, wire transfers, home improvement scams, charities, credit cards and so on.
Trying to stay connected to your senior family and possibly monitoring their bank accounts is a start. It’s not necessary to have access to their funds, but maybe just looking at their statements or checking online account activity. Remember to have those conversations with them and how they could possibly be targeted.
Another scam that seems to be in the news more often is one where the senior is contacted by phone and told that one of their grandchildren are in some sort of a financial bind, so the senior is asked to wire them some money. Then they ask them to keep the conversation a secret so parents or other family members won’t find out and the scammers be exposed. Once the target has wired the money, they will continue to contact them over and over to get even more money out of them!
As long as we have seniors, we will have scammers out there trying to come up with different ways to take advantage of them. Staying connected to our seniors and educating them on all the different ways that they may become a potential target and how to avoid being scammed can go a long way. Talking to them and saying it’s not OK to give out personal information such as social security numbers, banking account information or passwords could be a start to keeping someone from becoming a victim.
