I am sure by now all of you are familiar with the grandparent scam where a grandparent receives a telephone call from someone purporting to be their grandchild who has gotten into some trouble, most commonly a traffic accident, legal trouble or medical  problems in a far away place.  The caller pleads for the grandparent to send money immediately to help resolve the problem.  However the caller also begs the grandparent not to tell mom and dad.  One would think that no one would be gullible enough to fall for this scam, but don’t be so hard on the victims of this scam.  Scam artists have a knowledge of psychology of which Freud would have been envious and are able to use that knowledge to persuade their victims to send money right away. While this scam has been going on for approximately sixteen years, it continues to victimize people and has gotten worse and more convincing through the use of AI and voice cloning by scammers to make calls sound exactly like the grandchild’s voice.

Recently two elderly women in Vancouver Canada became victims of the grandparent scam after receiving calls from a man claiming to be the grandchild’s attorney informing the scam victims that the grandchild was in jail and needed $7,200 to cover court costs.  Things got interesting after that because the scammed grandparents were told that a courier would come to their homes and pick up the money.  The courier who picked up the money in both instances was not a knowing participant in the scam, but had accepted an unsolicited job offer he had not applied for to pick up funds on behalf of his employer.  After doing so twice from the elderly scam victims he became suspicious and went to police out of a concern that what he was involved with was illegal.  Fortunately, he still had the money from the final pickup and turned it over to police who are not filing charges against him.

TIPS

In regard to the grandparent scam, scammers often use the nicknames of the grandchildren when speaking to their intended victims.  Sometimes they get this information from social media while in other instances they get this information from reading obituaries which may contain the names of grandchildren so merely because the correct name is used in the call is no reason to believe the call.  Don’t respond immediately to such a call without calling the real grandchild on his or her cell phone or call the parents and confirm the whereabouts of the grandchild.  If a medical problem is the ruse used, you can call the real hospital.  If legal problems are the hook you can call the real police.  You can also test the caller with a question that could be answered only by the real grandchild, but make sure that it really is a question that  only the real grandchild could answer and not just anyone who might read the real grandchild’ s social media postings.  Prudent families can also come up with a code word to use in an emergency which a scammer will never know.

As for the job scam that turned an innocent person into a “money mule,” you should always be skeptical when you are contacted about a job for which you did not apply and a job for an unidentified employer picking up cash from people, particularly elderly people is always a scam.

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