Scams involving senior citizens continue to climb, and a NoVA advocate for older adults has advice to protect yourself from the new ways people are trying to break into your life.
Scammers took more than $3 billion from older Americans last year, the FBI reported, and fraudsters can come promising anything from romance to investment advice to technical support. Scamming is considered a low-risk crime, the National Council on Aging says, and scammers often target older people on the assumption that they generally have more money than other age groups.
Laura Halo, the fiscal and administration division manager for the Prince William Area Agency on Aging, says she’s seeing more scams against older adults in the area than ever and attributes the increase to a few factors: a larger senior population, artificial intelligence, and the complexity of the Medicare system, which leads people to give up their information to callers who claim to be trying to help.
The Real Thing
Halo’s agency co-hosted an event with the AARP to educate senior citizens on the scams that lay in wait for them. She recalls one of the speakers: a woman who received the phone call many are familiar with by now — a call purportedly from a lawyer for her granddaughter, saying he needed money immediately to get the granddaughter out of jail after a crash.
This call had a twist: the woman heard her granddaughter’s actual voice. “They sampled her actual voice somehow,” Halo says. “If I recall, it was from social media.”
Halo recalls the woman telling the crowd at the event, “‘I’m an intelligent woman; I didn’t think this could happen to me.’ But if you think you’re talking to your grandchild on the other end of the phone, you might not question it. If you think they’re in trouble, you think ‘I’ve just got to help them.’”
She adds that more and more scammers are posing as specialists helping people through the maze of Medicare — all they need is the information from your Medicare card.
Once they have that, they can order all sorts of medical equipment — wheelchairs, lifts, walkers, whatever — and then sell it, leaving you with the charges on your card.
“You need to treat your Medicare card very much like a credit card or a driver’s license,” Halo says. “It really needs to be very secure.”
Keep Information Private
Halo says the usual advice for avoiding scams — at any age — still holds as well: “Be concerned if you’re being pressured to act quickly. If someone is on the phone saying, ‘You’ve got to take care of this now.’” She adds that you should be careful on social media to follow only people you really know and to make sure it’s really them.
“It’s easy sometimes to share information thinking that you’re sharing it with your friends or your loved ones,” Halo says, “and if you don’t really know someone you have befriended on social media, and you share pictures of your home or information about your personal life, it’s easy for scammers to dig into that.”
Feature image, stock.adobe.com
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