RBC I Most of us would pay attention if we thought we were being contacted by Medicare, the IRS or a representative of the federal government, law enforcement or anyone else making an offer that is hard to refuse.
We would want to be cooperative, share whatever information is being requested and respond politely and promptly to whatever inquiries are being made.
However, we at AARP Foundation ElderWatch find ourselves telling people to suspend these instincts until they are sure that the callers are really representing the organizations or services they say they are.
Volunteers answering the phones at ElderWatch continue to hear stories about older Coloradans being contacted by people who want their money, personal information and Social Security numbers, solely for the purpose of making money at the elders’ expense.
And we’re finding that these impostor scams—where people pose as relatives, government agencies or law enforcers—are becoming more and more prevalent. In fact, in 2014, “Impostor Scams” are ranked as the sixth most common fraud reported into our office.
In 2013, they didn’t even make it into the top 10 list of complaint categories. This trend appears to be occurring on the national level as well, with the Federal Trade Commission reporting imposter scams as the country’s fourth most common fraud, up from No. 6 in 2012.
One of the most common impostor scams targeting older Coloradans is the grandparent scam. This most often occurs when a young person calls the potential victim pretending to be a grandchild. The caller claims they are in a foreign country and have been arrested for drunk driving or detained for some other reason and they need money wired to them in order to return home safely.
In many cases we discover that the scammers have mined social media sites to find personal information about the grandchild and grandparents, which makes this scam even more effective than it was in the past.
There are also instances where elders receive a call supposedly from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) telling them that they owe additional taxes and using various threats to intimidate them into sending money. This frightens many elders who have been told they will be arrested if they fail to respond.
An impostor scam that ElderWatch has been hearing about recently includes a call from “the government,” generally from a Washington, D.C. area code, informing the elder that he or she has been selected for a free government grant. All the older person has to do is pay a specified amount of money in advance for the taxes and fees to “release” the grant funds.
Often even a grant approval number is given, and call-back numbers are generally answered by a live person who claims to be with a government agency.
Most of us would agree that the government is an unlikely body to be giving “free grants,” but the lure has caught many older Coloradans off guard.
Warning citizens to be on alert should they be contacted by anyone asking for their Social Security number, demanding immediate payments or threatening them with arrest or legal action, can go a long way to stopping this kind of fraud.
We also try to raise consumer awareness of “red-flag” payment methods, such as wiring money or purchasing prepaid cards, such as the Green Dot MoneyPak card.
While the majority of these scams occur outside the jurisdiction of local law enforcement, it is important for older Coloradans to feel like they can report these crimes locally.
We encourage law enforcement to be accessible, approachable and patient with seniors who have been exposed to these scams because we often hear that they cause the senior to feel unsafe in their own home.
Please encourage older citizens in your community to be cautious and to be sure they do not give out sensitive information to unsolicited callers. And don’t hesitate to provide them with the ElderWatch phone number, 1-800-222-4444, option 2, where volunteers can provide peer counseling.
By Beau Ballinger
Senior Program Specialist
AARP Elderwatch
Submitted by the RBCSO
