The short answer to "How do criminals steal from the elderly?" is "by phone, mostly."
And new phone-based payment services that let you send money to others without even leaving your house make it crucial that you remember this key survival rule:
MONEY NEVER CALLS YOU ON THE PHONE.
And if you think you've found the exception to this rule, call an attorney or a trusted friend with good sense to discuss the offer before you do ANYTHING that the caller suggests. If you have truly found the exception to the rule, it'll wait for you to conduct a thorough investigation.
If you feel ANY pressure to seize the opportunity at all, that's the clearest sign of all that it's a SCAM.
Remember, the phone and internet means just one thing for sure:
Every criminal in the entire world is just one click or phonecall away from you.
In years past, you pretty much only did business with people nearby; now you can be ripped off by someone from a country you can't even pronounce just as easily as by someone who calls you from a boiler-room scam operation in your own hometown.
And new phone-based payment services that let you send money to others without even leaving your house make it crucial that you remember this key survival rule:
MONEY NEVER CALLS YOU ON THE PHONE.
And if you think you've found the exception to this rule, call an attorney or a trusted friend with good sense to discuss the offer before you do ANYTHING that the caller suggests. If you have truly found the exception to the rule, it'll wait for you to conduct a thorough investigation.
If you feel ANY pressure to seize the opportunity at all, that's the clearest sign of all that it's a SCAM.
Remember, the phone and internet means just one thing for sure:
Every criminal in the entire world is just one click or phonecall away from you.
In years past, you pretty much only did business with people nearby; now you can be ripped off by someone from a country you can't even pronounce just as easily as by someone who calls you from a boiler-room scam operation in your own hometown.
How Criminal Steal $37 billion a year from the elderly
by Nick Leiber, Bloomberg.
Marjorie Jones trusted the man who called to tell her she’d won a sweepstakes prize, saying she could collect the winnings once she paid the taxes and fees. After she wired the first payment, he and other callers kept adding conditions to convince her to send more money.
As the scheme progressed, Jones, who was legally blind and lived alone in a two-story house in Moss Bluff, Louisiana, depleted her savings, took out a reverse mortgage and cashed in a life insurance policy. She didn’t tell her family, not even the sister who lived next door. Scammers often push victims to keep promised winnings a secret, says an investigator who helped unravel this sinister effort to exploit an 82-year-old woman.
Her family didn’t realize something was wrong until she started asking to borrow money, a first for a woman they admired for her financial independence. But by then it was too late, says Angela Stancik, one of Jones’s granddaughters. Jones had lost all of her life savings—hundreds of thousands of dollars.
About one week after calling Stancik at the family business in Ganado, Texas, to borrow $6,000, Jones committed suicide.
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