Just Say NO! To Senior Scams (PDF) – A publication of Consumer Action, a San Francisco-based consumer advocacy organization that presents 13 different scams and then tells how you should “fight back”. Some of the scams covered include:

• Foreign lottery prizes and sweepstakes
• Fake emergency appeals
• Charitable solicitations
• Caregiver fraud
• Identity theft

There’s also a section at the beginning with six simple rules to follow and a section at the end of the document that includes some additional rules to follow, including my favorite, “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is”.

The document is in large type, so print it out and give it to someone who might appreciate it.

A Consumer Guide for Seniors (PDF) – This 36-page publication of the Maryland Office of the Attorney General is thorough, well-written and easy to understand. If you don’t live in Maryland, you may want to look to your State Attorney General’s web site for a similar document, though most of this publication is not specific to any one state. It covers the following topics:

• Consumer Scams -Sweepstakes, Charities, Travel Scams, etc.
• Health Issues – Home Medical Equipment Scams, Hearing Aids, Miracle Cures, etc.
• Financial Matters – Home Equity Fraud, Predatory Lending, Living Trusts, etc.

How To Protect Your Family From Senior Scams – This one from Lawyers.com covers a little different ground. There’s an interesting section on why seniors are particularly vulnerable to scams:

• More time on their hands
• Often more lonely
• More trusting and compassionate

An area covered here that I haven’t seen as much in other documents is on how a family can protect a senior from scams:

• Look at lifestyle changes
• Review their financial statements
• Get it in writing
• If you are a victim, act quickly

The latter part of the article talks about how the law gives you protection in scams.

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
   
3. 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.
   
4. Recognize when older people have been victimized or may be in grave danger and know how to help them.
5. 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.