Seniors learn how they can avoid getting scammed

By Stuart Hedstrom 
Staff Writer

    DOVER-FOXCROFT — Attendees at an April 25 meeting of Senior Network at the Morton Avenue Municipal Building had the opportunity to learn how to avoid becoming victims of various scams and frauds, which have become more sophisticated and widespread with advances in technology.

    “What we want to talk about is fraud and mail fraud,” Dover-Foxcroft Police Chief Dennis Dyer said. He said citizens will come into the police department with suspicious letters they have received in the mail, often promising them money in exchange for a small fee, and he estimated at least 75 to 90 percent of these mailings are fraudulent.
    “These people are so good and we have senior citizens who fall for this,” Dyer said. He mentioned an example of someone sending $25,000 overseas after replying to a notice that a person they had never even met had been jailed.
    U.S. Postal Inspector Michael Desrosiers spoke next, and he said he is one of the state’s two postal inspectors. “Our job is to ensure people trust the mail, and if people are scamming you are you trusting the mail?,” he said. Desrosiers said postal inspectors handle post office robberies and burglaries, mail fraud and theft, dangerous mail such as items containing drugs, hazardous substances and threatening letters, and credit card and identify theft.
    “There are 1,200 postal inspectors in the entire country, that’s not a lot of resources,” Desrosiers said. He explained he works for the smallest federal law enforcement agency in the U.S., and the only one that is not funded with taxpayer dollars.
    “All scams are designed for a single purpose … to separate you from your money,” Desrosiers said. “Most of the scams today are being perpetrated from across the seas,” he said, mentioning European and African countries as the homes of many scammers looking to fleece American citizens of their money. “For the bad guys it’s win-win, they can scam us all day long but what can I do from here? My laws end at the border. That’s why we are trying to get the word out what the scams are.”
    Desrosiers told the over dozen seniors in attendance, “Before you send money make sure you know and trust where it is going because once it is gone you will never see it again. The only way we can stop it is to educate American citizens.” National Consumer Protection Week, held annually in early March, promotes such a awareness and Desrosiers also said information is available at www.deliveringtrust.com.
    The biggest scams postal inspectors and other law enforcement agencies deal with are fake checks, cross border frauds, Internet frauds, foreign letters, work-at-home scams, identify theft and telemarketing scams. Desrosiers said a common example of a scam perpetrated involves a letter recipient being told they had won a cash prize and included in the mailing would be a check for a portion of their supposed winnings, which they can then cash and use to wire a handling fee to an overseas account in order to receive their full prize.
    He said eventually the individual’s bank will call to say the check bounced, and then they are responsible for the money deposited. “Scammers know our banking laws better then we do,” Desrosiers said. “If you get an unsolicited check in the mail be wary of it. Be skeptical, why is someone sending me a check? No one has sent me a check before. They will try every trick in the book to make it as real as possible and get you to send them money.”
    In other instances those selling goods or services may receive a check for a greater amount than was being asked, and when following up the person who sent the check suggests they simply send the remaining money back to them. One senior said she had a likely non-legit offer when she was selling a horse saddle for $1,000 through a local venue, and received a call in the middle of the night in which the person on the other end of the line was offering three times the asking price.
    Another attendee shared her story, saying she received a call from someone saying they were her grandson and needed money after getting into an accident in Canada. The caller used the same first name as the grandson and had other information that matched, and sounded like the grandson himself on the phone, so the grandmother ended up sending $1,500 as was requested.
    She said another call asked for more money, and she soon talked with the grandson himself to learn he was never in Canada. The scammer had gathered this personnel information which they then used in their deception.
    “We are all susceptible to getting scammed,” Desrosiers said. “Before you send something be sure you know where it is going to be sent.”
    After teaching how to tell real postal orders from fraudulent ones — specific watermarks, orders matching up with stubs and the internal security strip — he concluded by sharing a video detailing an inheritance scam. In the video the wife of a Bangor-area doctor said how he responded to e-mail saying he was the only living relative of a recently deceased with a multi-million dollar fortune.
    The doctor only needed to send a small fee in order to receive the inheritance, which he did and he began to send more money when asked until eventually $500,000 had been sent before fraud was detected. Desrosiers said how the doctor was a very smart man, but even he fell victim to a scam.