Seniors and scammers

By Mike Lange
Staff Writer

 I’m sorry I missed the AARP Scam Jam at the Augusta Civic Center last week, a workshop on ways to detect and discourage people from fleecing your bank account.

Unfortunately, last week was tied up with meetings, ball games, a killer on the loose and editing community news.

 But as part of the AARP generation, I’m well aware of phone scams, phishing and bogus charities. Possibly because of my 30-year background in journalism, I haven’t lost a dime to these bums. But that’s not to say that they haven’t tried it.

 Rarely a week goes by without receiving an email from a credit union that I’ve never heard of asking me to “click here to verify your account.” My first instinct after getting the first 10 emails was to reply with a colorful phrase not used in mixed company.

 But that’s the second-worst thing you can do. By replying, you’re verifying your address, thus opening up the floodgates for similar spam.

 The worst thing you can do, obviously, is to click on the link. That could bring a cyber-worm into your system that could conceivably dig out every email address along with some passwords.

 Eventually, I found out that the phony credit union email came from Estonia. So here’s good luck to anyone trying to prosecute the criminals running the site.

 But some spammers are a little brighter. They create clones of legitimate websites and flood the Internet with similar “please verify your account” messages.

 My own bank website has been cloned two or three times and I can’t imagine how many people might have fallen for the scam.

 The best thing to remember is that no bank or federal agency will ever ask you to “verify” anything by email. They’ll either call you or notify you by regular mail.

 Another scam discussed last week was the “Help Me Granny” game. You get a phone call from someone who claims they’re from a police department 250 miles away, and they have your grandson or granddaughter locked up in the pokey for a criminal offense.

So the first thing you do is look at the caller ID; and sure enough, it’s from a police department somewhere.

 The phony officer then wants you to wire some money to bail the kid out.

 First of all, most police departments will let the offender make their own phone calls. So you’d recognize their voice and see their number on caller ID.

 But it was from the police station, right? Wrong. Caller ID’s can be spoofed easily. Experts can rig up phones with the White House or the Vatican caller ID if they want to.

 Smart grandparents, of course, say “Thank you for the information” and hang up. Then they call the so-called jailed grandkid and discover that they’re actually sunbathing in Lily Bay State Park.

 Why are seniors so vulnerable to these pranks? Scammers assume we have a decent-sized bank account, so we want to monitor any changes in the financial institution’s terms. Thus, the “just click here” scheme.

 And none of us want to see our grandkids spending the weekend in the Crowbar Hotel if we can help it. Remember, we were young once and some of us even got in trouble.

 So take my advice. If it sounds like a scam, it probably is.

 And if you see the Vatican on caller ID, chances are it’s not Pope Francis.

 Mike Lange is a staff writer with the Piscataquis Observer. His opinions are his own and don’t necessarily reflect those of this newspaper.

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