These days, scam artists have become very sophisticated -- and they are far from obvious.
I got a call a while back from the fraud department at my bank. There had been some unusual activity on my account and they wanted to check some things.
I wish I could say that all sorts of alarm bells went off in my head. They didn’t. The call sounded just like many conversations I’ve had with legitimate call centers. It was only a matter of basic principle that caused me to insist on calling him back.Financial scams have long since left behind the “Nigerian prince” days, when we’d get ridiculous, misspelled, ungrammatical emails from strangers making preposterous offers.
And as Medicare open-enrollment season — or “senior-citizen hunting season” — looms, an alarming new study finds that despite all the warnings, many senior Americans remain vulnerable and ripe for the plucking. The subjects were chosen from participants in the long-running Rush Memory and Aging Project. The average age was 86 and about three-quarters were women.
The Federal Trade Commission estimates about half a million seniors get scammed out of $1.5 billion a year. The AARP puts the loss figure much higher, at $8 billion. Nobody knows the real answer, partly because many seniors who get scammed are embarrassed and don’t report it. I didn’t spot the fraud immediately when they called me, and I write about this stuff for a living. I’m not as dumb as I look, either.Those most likely to fall for the scam were not older, lonelier, or more likely to be cognitively impaired than the others. They typically had slightly lower financial literacy. But the real standout is that they were much less likely to be “scam aware,” and were much less likely to have been victims of financial fraud in the past. Their trust was still intact.
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