When my son was first venturing out into the world he took a year to work and enjoy a sense of independence before starting college.
He looked into numerous possibilities across a broad range of occupations, including offers to sell magazines and water filters in which the “salesman” has to buy the product up front but is promised instant riches by reselling at exorbitant prices – which I strongly advised against.
He took my advice and ultimately spent a year working on a landscaping crew; tough, physical work that didn’t make him much money but gave him an immense appreciation for chain saws.
Ron Winter
When all was said and done there was one cardinal rule that applied regardless of the field he was exploring: If you have to dip into your own pocket to get a job and you aren’t running your own business, walk away.
The same rule applies for the elderly, who are more vulnerable to scams and fraud all year long, but we seem to hear about it much more around the Christmas holidays. There are as many variations on scams as there are scam artists, but the cardinal rule that applies in all cases is Don’t Go Into Your Own Pocket.
Don’t give money to people you don’t know – and in some cases even those you do know – no matter how heart wrenching their story. The surest way to lose money is to give it to a complete stranger who has one heck of a story of woe, which always accompanies a promise to pay the money back immediately. Of course, the stranger always disappears and the money is always gone.
With the increasing use of credit and debit cards for Internet sales many scams have gone high tech. Offers are made on-line which promise a hard-to-turn-down reward if you only pay a small amount up front. You make a payment but the reward disappears along with the website where you first found it.
In addition, thieves get jobs working Internet sales desks at legitimate businesses and use their positions to obtain card numbers and even the security codes on the back. They then use the information from your card to make purchases in your name. Usually this is done by charging a small amount to you account to see if it goes through and then making much larger charges.
This scam can work just as easily for clerks at restaurants and retail stores and consumers should watch to ensure that clerks don’t spend undue amounts of time examining their cards.
But even as the world has gone high-tech there still are plenty of face-to-face scam artists who pride themselves on lifting money from unsuspecting “marks.”
There are several theories about why thieves target the elderly, including that elder citizens can become confused and manipulated more easily, which may be true in some but not all cases. I also believe that the elderly are targeted because the kind of slimeball who makes a living by stealing from old people probably knows there is a substantially lower risk of them getting their heads handed to them by a person in their 90s than one in their 60s.
Among the variations on the face to face scams are those that require the thief to enter your home under false pretenses and steal from you. For instance in the so-called “Good Neighbor Scam” a person comes to your door and says they have been involved in an accident as they were on the way to your neighbor’s house.
Your neighbor, who supposedly is a relative of the accident victim, won’t be home – the scammer already has determined this – and the stranger asks for money to pay the tow truck, promising to pay you back the second your neighbor returns. But when the neighbor gets back the con is gone along with the money.
Other variations include people posing as government bureaucrats or service providers. They may say they are taking a survey, or checking a water or electric meter, or that they have an “anonymous” report of a person in distress living at that address. They always say they need to enter your home, often with an accomplice who rummages through your valuables while you are distracted.
Not only should you ask for identification, but you also should verify that the identification is legitimate. Even people who have identification, such as workers for the Aging Department or people claiming to be Elder Care representatives, have no right to enter your home just because they flash an identification badge.
A good adage for dealing with situations where you are unsure of what you should do comes from the movie Ronin; Whenever you have a doubt, there is no doubt. If you follow that concept, it is wise whenever you have a doubt to call the police and have them check out the individual.
A legitimate government worker still can be a scam artist just as easily as a common crook. Only the police have a right to enter a private residence and unless they are pursuing a crime in progress, they still have to have a warrant.
Another scam used on the elderly targets those who drive. Cons stage small car crashes with seniors to get them out of their vehicles and trick them out of their cash. The cons stage “accidents” that are large enough to cause the victim to stop, but don’t require the police.
The cons make a show of exchanging fake drivers license and insurance information by handing the victims their wallets and taking the victims’ wallets in return, then slipping out the money and credit cards while the other driver is again distracted.
The fact is, there will always be human predators who try to take what other people have because they are too lazy to work. They will scam people, the government, friends and families to get what they want.
Thomas Jefferson once said “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.” That is especially true for the elderly, and especially around the holidays.
