Elderly scams target your parents to get them to part with their hard-earned cash. Imagine a panicked call from your mother who just purchased $1200 worth of Best Buy gift cards. She had just finished reading several of the gift card codes to a mysterious person on the phone. Scammers created a false website that showed a realistic but fake view of her bank account. It appears as if she had received a deposit of $2000 to pay for the cards and retain a profit. I found myself in this situation 2 years ago. This happened to our family and it could happen to yours. Aging parents become more susceptible as scams get more sophisticated and your parent’s age,
Think twice before assuming that my parent or loved one would never fall victim to a scam. Scams have been around for centuries and you nor your family are immune to them. The CDC reports that 1 in 10 people over 60 fall prey to some form of elderly abuse. In 2020, elderly abuse scams netted an estimated $3 billion for scammers, according to a Senate Committee Study on Aging.
Why do scams work?
Elderly scams work by effectively disrupting your decision-making process in 3 ways:
- Elicit emotional responses like excitement, hope, or worry, which cloud your judgment.
- Create a sense of urgency, which causes you to feel pressure to act quickly without considering information comprehensively.
- Exploit common heuristics (or learned rules or mental shortcuts) to lead your brain to make impulsive, ill-considered decisions.
Information Gathering Scams
This type of scam aims to elicit fear, anxiety, and worry by appearing as an authority figure who needs information to act effectively on your behalf. They create a sense of urgency by highlighting that you have to act soon to prevent you from missing out on some monetary gain or falling victim to future legal or benefits-related issues. They exploit the common heuristic of trusting authority figures. The combination of these factors break down your decision making and lead people to fall victim to scams, especially the elderly.
- Medicare Scams – Scammers will pose as Medicare representatives and call to collect information to advance your application or instate your Medicare benefits.
- Tax Fraud Scams – Around tax time, scammers will create fake websites under the ruse of completing your taxes but will gather your information for their purposes.
- Fake Virus Scanner links – On certain websites, virus scanners will aggressively pop-up. Clicking on them can lead to nefarious sites that install viruses on computers.
- Social Security or IRS Scams – Scammers call pretending to be from the IRS or Social Security office. They will claim that they need your personal information to ensure you can claim social security benefits or prevent you being require to pay large tax sums.
Opportunity to Win Big
Everyone dreams of winning the lottery or having a long-lost relative leave them sums of money. This type of scam preys on people’s excitement, hope, and desire to feel lucky or blessed. When you are excited, you are more likely to act impulsively. For a scammer, that’s perfect.
- Sweepstakes/lottery/government grant scams – With these scams, people are presented with fortuitous luck that has brought them a windfall. However, to receive this windfall you are required to provide a credit card or bank account number. Big mistake!
- [INSERT RANDOM] Money Making Opportunity – If you’ve recently heard from a long lost friend or relative via social media or telephone and they have a new money-making opportunity for you, it’s likely a scam. With many of these scams hackers take over social media accounts and send messages out to people asking to text a number or click a link to learn more about the opportunity. From there they may try to get you to take additional steps, all to collect your personal information.
Remember, winning sweepstakes, the lottery, or random windfalls is extremely unlikely. Don’t fall prey to these scams.
Heart Strings Based Scams
This type of elderly scam plays on human vulnerabilities of wanting to help others, emotional bonds with family members, and romantic feelings. They aim to use pre-existing relationships or strong emotions to break down your decision-making process.
- Family Emergency Scam – In these scams, someone pretending to be a family member is said to be in trouble and a money wire will save them.
- Funeral Scams – Funeral scammers tend to prey on widows and widowed children. They may highlight an unpaid debt from the deceased or even use romantic overtures to win your trust in a time of need.
- Gifting circles (aka Pyramid schemes) – Community-based pyramid schemes have recently increased in prevalence. In this scam, people who you may know from church or extended family members approach to join a community gifting circle. In this circle, you pay to join the club and then find other people to pay you to join. As long as the cycle continues, everybody makes money. However it’s not a circle, it’s a pyramid and someone will eventually lose their initial investment.
- Sweetheart scams– Some scammers will use dating apps or social networking sites to build relationships with people. Once they’ve earned your trust they may ask for money to get out of a jam. At first, the sums may be small but over time the issues grow in complexity as do the small sums of money.
- Charity Scams – Following a major event you may get called to donate money or a charity. They’re leveraging the crisis and a desire to contribute to the solution as a way to short fire your decision making.
Avoid being scammed
- Avoid contact via phone or online with people who you don’t know.
- Add yourself and your parent’s number to the Do Not Call registry to reduce the number of
- Don’t ever give out private information like social security number, bank account, and routing numbers over the phone.
- Avoid clicking on pop-ups
- Don’t assume calls from the DMV, IRS, Social Security Department, or other government agencies are real – These agencies tend to send you physical mail and they have all of the key personally identifiable information they need. If you have any reason to believe an issue is valid, politely hang up and find the real number to the agency.
- Don’t open attachments for special offers or from email addresses or phone numbers you don’t recognize.
- Don’t use public wi-fi for any banking or shopping.
- Build trust with your loved ones – People are often too scared or prideful to report getting scammed. Your goal is to keep the communication channels open with your loved one so they turn to you for help when needed. Remind your parents to call you if they have any questions or need a gut-check. Parents, remember that your children are here to help.
What to do if your parents get scammed
- Let them know it’s going to be okay! Thank them for coming to you with this issue. 1 in 10 people over 60 fall victim to elderly scams.
- Add a fraud alert to your parents to make it harder for thieves with information to open new accounts. Placing a fraud alert is free and once you add it via one of the credit bureaus, they inform the other 2
- Work with them to update their passwords
Report the details to the FBI to help them prevent further scams
