Seniors are in the scammer’s crosshairs.
A couple of weeks ago, I read a New York Times article (gift link; if it doesn’t work, let me know) detailing how a 76-year-old retired lawyer was scammed out of nearly three-quarters of a million dollars, draining his retirement savings.
This is not an isolated case. Authorities mentioned there were at least seven others pulled into the same scheme run by the same people. And there are hundreds (if not thousands) of such people working hard to scam us out of our money.
It takes many guises. In this article, I want to review some examples, some signs, and some of the steps you should take to keep yourself and your savings safe.
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Online scams
A 76-year-old retired lawyer lost nearly $740,000 in an elaborate scam thinking he was aiding a government investigation. This highlights the prevalence of scams targeting older adults. Criminals use manipulative tactics to steal savings. Protect yourself by recognizing scam signs, avoiding unsolicited contacts, and seeking help if you have even the slightest doubt.
The example scam
From the New York Times article:
For nearly three months, Barry Heitin, a 76-year-old retired lawyer, thought he was part of a government investigation that felt like something out of the movies. He was actually assisting criminals in stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars — of his own money.
Last fall, he spent just about every weekday doing the legwork and making withdrawals from his bank accounts as part of an intricate scam: He believed he was helping the feds safeguard his money and catch thieves who were after it.
“They kept telling me, ‘This is a big case and we are going to stop a whole ring of people,’” Mr. Heitin said. “It was like a rabbit hole. I was going down the hole with them.”
It cost him almost all of his retirement savings: roughly $740,000.
Scams like this are rampant. The details, amounts, and mechanics differ, but one thing is common: people place trust in others they absolutely should not.
Every day.
But I have nothing of value!
One of the common excuses I hear from folks is that they have nothing to steal. For example, they don’t have $740,000 in retirement savings. As a result, they feel there’s no need to be cautious; they believe they have nothing to lose.
Most scammers don’t know or care how much you may or may not have when the scam starts.
And you still have plenty to lose.
Scammers’ goals can vary and even shift depending on what they discover about you along the way.
- They may happily take what little you do have.
- They may scam you in such a way that you’ll borrow or even steal money to give to them. For example, they might pose as overseas relatives in trouble and in desperate need of cash. Scammers have even faked the kidnapping of a loved one to extort a ransom by threatening to kill the “victim” (who has not been kidnapped).
- They may want something other than money from you — usually enough personal information to impersonate you. Then they open credit cards and take out loans where they get the money but you get the bill.
- Having little, they may entice you with the possibility of getting riches by helping them out — which often involves your paying a comparatively small “fee” to begin with.
If you think you have nothing to steal or be scammed out of, you are wrong. In fact, you are particularly vulnerable.
But this only happens to old folks
Older adults are, indeed, targeted for many scams.
- Older folks often have more money in retirement accounts.
- Statistically, older folks are less technologically inclined and thus easier to fool with digital sleight-of-hand.
- Older folks have often been brought up to be more trusting and polite, and thus are less likely to hang up or just say no.
So, yes, older adults are seen as easier marks and are frequently targeted.
However, that doesn’t mean younger folks are safe.
So older adults — which they define as 60 plus — and then younger adults, which is 18 to 59-year-olds. So older adults were more likely to fall victims to scams with a business imposter, tech support, […] prizes, sweepstakes and lotteries. And then friend and family imposters. Younger adults are massively more likely to fall victims to scams in online shopping, investment scams, fake check scams.
– Mike Maughan, Why Do People Get Scammed? episode, No Stupid Questions podcast
Regardless of your age, you are at serious — I might say “massive” — risk.
Related
What Is a Pig-Butchering Scam?
Pig-butchering is a nasty term for a particularly painful type of scam. Here's how to protect yourself.But they really love me
One of the most heartbreaking scams is the romance scam. The scammer initiates casual contact online, and then over days, weeks, or even months poses as a love interest, working the relationship to a point where you would do anything for them.
Anything.
And “anything”, of course, usually involves sending them money.
There are many stories of individuals who have lost everything to a “lover” they’ve never met. Even in the face of strenuous objections from family and friends, these individuals persist in going down the path of trickery until all their resources have been drained, and their online lover disappears.
Particularly since the COVID pandemic, loneliness has become a pandemic of its own. Scammers know this and leverage that fact to lure unsuspecting victims.
And things are getting worse.
AI has entered the chat
In March of last year, I played a little with that week’s introduction to the TEH Podcast. At the beginning of that episode, the hosts — myself and Gary Rosenswieg — introduce ourselves. Except we didn’t. I used voice-generating AI to mimic our voices so closely that unless you knew what to listen to and listened closely, you might not realize it was us. (Current episodes use an AI voice for the introduction, though it’s not an attempt to mimic anyone.)
Now, imagine you get a phone call from a family member who’s pleading with you to do whatever the criminals want because they’ve been kidnapped, and if you don’t follow instructions, your loved one will be killed. And it sounds exactly like your loved one. Particularly in the stress and heat of the moment, encouraged by the life-threatening situation, your skepticism flies out the window. You believe that person has been kidnapped because you heard their voice.
Of course, you did not. You’re the victim of a scam. The scammers have somehow synthesized the voice of someone you care about — training that can easily happen from a single social media post — and are using that to play on your emotions and encourage you to take action you otherwise would not. Like stealing money or worse.
The fact is, AI is only getting better, and it’s cheap and easy for anyone to use, including scammers.
Did I actually say that, or not?1
You can’t even believe what you hear anymore.
How to protect yourself from online scams
It feels like we can’t believe anything anymore. While that’s not absolutely true, I agree it’s truer now than ever before.
So how do you protect yourself?
There are a variety of recommendations.
- Don’t answer the phone if you don’t recognize the number. Period. If it’s important to them, they’ll leave voicemail. If it’s important to you, and you’ve had a moment to consider its veracity, you can return the call.
- As soon as something smells fishy (or phishy), just hang up. Scammers do not deserve your politeness.
- If something sounds too good to be true — promises of love or wealth, for example — it’s likely a scam. Do not engage.
- If something sounds exceptionally dire, especially if it’s presented with extreme urgency, it’s likely a scam. Do not engage.
- Have a safe word — something agreed upon beforehand to allow you to confirm you’re talking to who you think you are regardless of their voice. (Point them to this article if they look funny at you when you ask them to set it up. Yes, I have one.2)
- Are you still using paper checks? Consider going digital. Crooks steal checks, wash them to remove the payee and amount, and then re-write them to themselves.
- At the other end of the spectrum, if you’re asked to provide crypto-currency (like Bitcoin), precious metals (like gold bars), or gift cards (which cannot be revoked), it’s almost certainly a scam.
- Don’t buy puppies (or any animal) online. Scammers have no puppy and are just looking to relieve you of your money.
- Never send large amounts of money to someone you’ve never met.
- Undue urgency is always a warning sign. Be extra skeptical.
If you’re just not sure, ask for help. I can’t stress this enough. Most victims end up digging themselves deeper by being too embarrassed to ask a trusted friend or family member for help. There’s nothing to be embarrassed about. Scammers are good and getting better, and they’re rampant. I can guarantee you that others want you to reach out for help rather than fall victim.
Do this
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Footnotes & References
1: I did not. I copy/pasted the preceding sentence into the ElevenLabs speech generator, which had been trained on my voice.
2: There’s so much freely available audio of my voice out there that making a digital clone of me would be trivially easy. But this is surprisingly true for more people than you might imagine, including yourself.
Additional References
- The Perfect Scam podcast, from AARP
- I Never Thought I Could Be Scammed … Until I Was – AARP
- How To Avoid a Scam – FTC
- Common Scams and Crimes – FBI
I was a long-haul trucker for 22 years. During that time, it wasn’t unusual to be approached at a truck stop, rest area, and other locations by people asking for a few dollars because “Their car broke down”, “They got stranded and needed a bus ticket”, or just about any scenario one can think of.
Over time I started noticing that in certain locations, there were the same individuals with the same scripts. I’ve never been good with names but can recognize people even after meeting them once. Even if it had been six months or more, as soon as they started with their spiel, memory kicked in and I’d notify management at whatever facility I was at. “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”
Now that I’m retired I get extremely skeptical when confronting phone calls, messages, emails and even snail mail that want me to respond to some type of offer or other. I’ve even managed to convince my wife to let calls go to voice mail if she doesn’t recognize the number. If you’re not on my contact list, I probably won’t answer.
I know the procedures my financial services follow and I know what my family members are up to in general and what their habits are. I will check via other means before I do anything.
On top of all that, I’m also retired Navy. During my time in the Navy I found myself involved in a couple of investigations conducted by the Naval Investigative Service (Today it is known as NCIS), so I do have some knowledge of how undercover investigations work in real life. It isn’t how Hollywood portrays it. I was surprised when reading the NYT story at how easily the victim fell for it. Law enforcement will never conduct an investigation using civilians without several face-to-face meetings, not if they want the case to stand up in court. They need to have everything documented and ensure there are no holes in their case.
I see the piano scam quite a bit. “I have to get rid of my late husband’s grand piano. I’d like to give it to someone who will love and care for it.” Once you are baited, they tell you how much it will cost to have the movers get it to you and ask for you to send them the money so “she” can send it to you. Once you send the money, the piano never comes.
I’ve heard of similar things using Facebook Marketplace, where they want you to send them a deposit to secure it because there’s a lot of interest in the item. You send the money, but never get the item. I’m sure Facebook is not the only online platform that scammers target, but it’s convenient given the large number of Facebook users.
If the scammer has an actual person posing as the kidnapped person altering their voice via AI, ask them a question that only they know the answer to.
Make sure that the domain in an email’s From address and in any links in the email is what you expect. If the email purports to have come from Amazon.com, the From address and the “click here to do so-and-so” link should be at Amazon.com. I believe Leo has an article covering this.
Two decades ago, my widowed MIL lost $25k to a phone scammer selling her lottery tix from Spain (foreign lotteries are illegal — gotta protect our US market of suckers). We found out when paying her bills while she recovered from surgery – literally had her guts in a knot with worry. Luckily my husband was on her checking account; we cancelled and transferred everything. She never got the money back but at least we stopped the bleed. I wound up talking to a US Postal Inspector who said the “nest” had moved from Vegas to Montreal. I talked to a guy at the RCMP who said, “Don’t be mad at her: these people are very good at what they do.” Keep that in mind if you have vulnerable friends and family. Be understanding and offer help. Tell these stories at Thanksgiving dinner — it’s a form of vaccination!
For starters, my credit with six credit bureaus (Thank you, Bob Ranken!) is frozen (using long, strong pins), so imposters would have a hard time trying to establish any sort of credit card, or loan.
Next, I never respond to email addresses or phone calls I don’t recognize. I know when to expect legitimate calls (such as when dealing with medical referrals) from numbers I don’t recognize, so I may make very cautious/suspicious exceptions in those cases.
I have a limited number of living family members, and I know how to contact all of them. If I would ever receive a kidnapping threat about any of them, I’d contact them before doing anything else, no matter what threat was leveraged against them. If the purported kidnappers want any money from me, they’ll have to wait until I can establish the legitimacy of the threat, so if they resist, I have more evidence that the threat’s a scam. I’d apply similar tactics to any threat-based scam/event.
Finally, I start with the knowledge that no one’s safe from scammers. Any of us can be fooled, so I approach any unexpected event with a healthy dose of skepticism. I avoid providing any personally identifiable information online. Since the recent data breaches may have exposed most American’s identity information, including SSNs, names, addresses, etc., I check my credit information monthly for new activity, so I can stop anything fraudulent ASAP.
If anyone has additional suggestions, I’m all ears,
Ernie (Oldster)
Today I got an email saying that my subscription to a music app would renew automatically for $324.56 with the card they had on file on that day. I typed in the sender’s email. That came back as a non-existent email. The phone number search on Google was associated with a PayPal scam and lastly, the address when googled was a run-down house for sale in Florida. I did not call them because of the research I did I knew it was a scam.
Lotta people saying how they are ready for this. I said the same thing. But these guys are very very VERY good (and the ones who aren’t kinda self-select out). Many times I have read stories like the NYT article above about guys like Barry and thought “geez, I am a CFO, I am smarter than that!”, but don’t you believe it.
In my case, my wife got scammed just over a year ago and it was for just under $30,000. She got a call, worked with the guys “from the municipality” about property registration and fell for it. I watched her take that call and was no help and fell for it too. Within minutes of taking her “to a ‘new bank website with enhanced security’ to do some updates,” they had drained her bank accounts. A few were personal and our insurance coverage includes identity theft, which this apparently qualified for, and we recovered those amounts. The vast majority though better than 90% were business accounts and insurance was not available for that.
So, from a guy who was (but no longer is) waaay smarter and well prepared for the bad guys, my suggestions (without repeating much of Leo’s suggestions above:
– If someone calls you about financial matters of any kind, ask them their name and what office they are calling from (not the phone number, just the office), go look up that office’s phone number on Google and call and ask for that person. Trust me they won’t exist or if they do, won’t know what you are talking about. (by the way, my wife has literally been contacted twice more by the SAME GROUP, as well as by one other (she didn’t take the call for the first two and told the other that she only does business in person at their office…).
– If you get a text from a friend with a link, call them BEFORE you click on it.
– If you get an email with a link, even if the from address is good (I got one apparently from myself once ), call and check before you click. It takes more time on your phone than just hovering over a link, but you can do it. But I like the good old fashioned verbal approach “did you send me an email/text with a link you really wanted me to click?”
– If you are on Facebook and a friend’s post has a link, DO NOT CLICK (I fell for that once too because who would think that FB wouldn’t protect against that… They don’t, but my MalwareBytes jumped up and blocked me so I got lucky…
– Most importantly, if it happened to you, tell others about it. Easy to say I know, but it is nothing to be embarrassed about.
This is not about not trusting people, it is about not trusting technology (call me a Luddite, I will wear it with pride…). It is also about protecting your financial future as well. Good luck everyone.
One other thing. If your insurance offers identity theft coverage, make sure you know what that means in their contract, but get it, it is cheap. Or look for other insurers who cover it as it is getting more common. If these had all been personal accounts, we would have gotten 85% of the money back under our limits.
Also, apparently I am having a problem closing parentheticals, so apologies for the misses above…
As Leo said, “Do not engage”. Every one of these scams requires repeated actions and participation by the victims. This “lawyer” guy did so may things wrong that it’s a good thing he is a retired lawyer.
But in this case the scam process was not the problem – that’s easy enough to ward off by not engaging. The initial problem was not being able to log into the 401k plan. How did that happen? Phishing webpage? Why did the lawyer ignore it for days?
One of the most costly “scams” is the breakup of a marriage or partnership.
Little thought is ever given to this aspect of a relationship and will affect many more folk than online scams.
A financial agreement should be compulsory before any union.
Once money is sent out of the country, there is little chance of getting it back .Law enforcement is too difficult in multiple jurisdictions.
One thing I don’t understand is often when I go on YouTube (which I don’t that often), the first link on the right hand side is something like “beautiful Ukrainian girl looking for relationship”. I use a VPN; never, ever log in (if I am asked to I don’t watch the video); cookies and history are cleared every time I close the browser; and I use add-ons to prevent tracking. Is this just a scatter-shot approach, the videos I watch do not fit into any category, age group or style?
Everyone gets ads similar to those. They are not necessarily targeted.
Another possible scam source is snail mail. I’ve only received that kind once, but it can be convincing as people don’t expect it.