Tips on Avoiding Scams
There are always people looking to take money from the elderly and with the economy worsening, the scammers are likely to become more aggressive while the potential victims are more vulnerable to the hope of economic salvation.
The best way to protect yourself, or a family member, it through education and a healthy dose of skepticism. Here are some tips gleaned from a number of sources.
Phone Scams
National Consumer League runs a site called Fraud.org. While it’s not a very well constructed/maintained site, it does have a good page for protecting yourself from fraud that happens over the phone. They have five steps:
- Help convince older people, who may be targets, that fraudulent telemarketers are hardened criminals who don’t care about the pain they cause when they steal someone’s life savings.
- Know that fraudulent telemarketers take advantage of the following: it’s difficult to tell whether someone is legitimate, seniors tend to be trusting, it’s easy to wear people down, we all want to believe, and it’s hard to hang up.
- Help older people recognize the “red flags” of fraud like, a promise that you can win money, make money, or borrow money easily and it’s illegal for companies that operate contests or sweepstakes.
- Recognize when older people have been victimized or may be in grave danger and know how to help them.
- Inform older people about how to reduce the number of unwanted sales calls and mailings they receive and how to deal effectively with telemarketers, like how to avoid getting on sucker lists.
You can find the full details here: They Can’t Hang Up
Medicare Scams
Philip Moeller in his U.S.News blog, The Best Life, outlines the 9 Ways to Avoid Medicare Sales Scams about anyone who represents himself or herself as selling a Medicare policy:
- Must be licensed by the state
- May not make unsolicited contacts
- May not use certain healthcare settings, such as a doctor’s office
- May not offer you gifts
See all 9 at U.S. News.
AARP Scam Alert
The AARP Bulletin covers this topic under the Scam Alert headline. Recent post include, ‘Caribbean Calls‘ on a lottery scam and ‘Conning the Curious‘ on an email virus.
Snopes.com
Finally, one of our favorite resources is Snopes, a site that verifies, or debunks, rumors, urban legends and scams among other things. The site is searchable so that you can enter some keywords and find out whether the proposition is true or not. They also have a Fraud & Scams category.
One important page to review on the Snopes site is the one on ‘phishing‘–the online imitation of a company’s branding in spoofed e-mail messages and web sites, created with the intent of fooling unsuspecting users into divulging personal information such as passwords, credit card numbers, PINs, etc.
Please remember to be cautious and to ask yourself, does it seems to good to be true? If it does, then it probably is. Ask a family member, or trusted advisor, before doing anything that involves your finances.
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