Those Annoying “Buy Your House” Texts

If you own a house–or if you formerly owned a house–you undoubtedly get them: those annoying but also unnerving texts from total strangers who address you by name and want to engage you in a conversation about selling your home. The texts are annoying because they clutter your text inbox and confirm that no form of communication is truly safe from unwanted solicitation efforts. They are unnerving because they show that, somewhere out in the internet vastness, telemarketers and potential scammers are trying to cobble together bits of information to link your name, your cell phone number, and your property holdings.

So, are these texts part of some fraudulent scheme, or are they legitimate efforts to buy a house? Apparently some house-buying texts fall into one category, and some fall into the other. The scam potential of such texts seems pretty obvious: the scammers want to knit together as much personal information about you as possible, which could be used for identity theft purposes, and hope that if they engage you in a text conversation you will divulge some personal financial information that they use to take your money. It’s hard to believe that anyone would fall for such a scam–but then who would have thought that people would fall for the Prince from Nigeria scams, either?

The article linked above, and a local report from a Columbus TV station, say that some of the texts are “legitimate” in the sense that they are from people who do in fact want to buy your house–or for that matter any house. They are flippers looking to purchase properties at bargain prices, perhaps make a few cosmetic changes, and then sell them. The texts you receive from the flippers are the modern equivalent of “cold calls,” with texts being used because no one owns land line phones any more or answers their cell phone when a strange number shows up. It’s an intrusive way to do business, which is just another reason why those texts are best ignored and immediately deleted without responding. If you want to sell your house, a local realtor who has been part of the community for years and who can give you an informed sense of fair market value is a better and safer option.

One final consideration is that, with interest rates going up and house prices going down, the “legitimate” texts about whether you are willing to sell your house are likely to stop, because no rapacious house-flipper is going to want to buy properties, spend money to fix them up, and then try to sell them at a profit in a down market. That means that, in the future, most if not all of those texts will be from fraudsters looking to cheat you in some way or another. It’s just another reason to be wary of unsolicited communications.

The Bad Guys Out There

Every day, at the office, I receive multiple obviously fraudulent emails, and our IT department regularly sends out notices to advise us of still other phishing attempts that are being sent to our attorneys. And the fraud attempts aren’t just limited to my email, either–it seems like at least once a week I get a phony text, or a phony Messenger message, or a phony friend invitation from an unknown person or former Facebook user who I know for a certainty has passed to the Great Beyond.

In short, my own personal experience teaches that there’s a heck of a lot of fraud out there. Fortunately, most of the fraud attempts are easily detectable if you are just paying attention to the basics of sound data security practices–don’t click on whatever random link you might receive, be suspicious of email from people you’ve never heard of, watch for misspellings and weird language choices, and so on–but still, there is a lot of it.

This regular confrontation with attempted criminal activity is weird, when you think about it. Many of us don’t have any contact with crooks in our daily, non-electronic lives. But now, thanks to the technology that often seems to dominate our existences, new virtual doorways exist that might allow the bad guys to enter and bilk us out of our hard-earned money, steal our personal data, or even take our identities. Every day, on our devices, it’s as if we are walking through dark alleys with unknown people lurking in the recesses and shadowed doorways. And we know they are there, because every day they are sending us those messages that affirmatively remind us of their nefarious existence and criminal intent.

Are there more criminals out there than there once were, or do electronic processes allow the crooks to reach out and touch more people than could occur in the pre-electronic era? My guess is that it is a bit of both, and that a lot of what we are receiving comes from anonymous fraudsters in countries so far away that we never would encounter them but for the internet. Whatever the answer might be, it’s up to us to stay on guard, be vigilant, exercise good judgment at all times, and clutch our data tight when we walk through Internet Alley. It adds a new element of stress to the modern world, where a fleecing may be only one click away.

The Ceaseless Quest For Rankings

If you want some tangible evidence of how rankings have affected the activities of colleges, universities, and other institutions of higher education, you need look no farther than Philadelphia, Pennsylvania– where a federal court jury recently convicted Moshe Porat, the long-time dean of the Temple University Richard J. Fox School of Business and Management, of mail and wire fraud in connection with a scheme to boost that school’s U.S. News and World Report ranking.

According to a statement released by the U.S. Attorney’s office for Eastern Pennsylvania, Porat, who served as the dean of the business management school from 1996 to 2018, was convicted after the jury found that he had “conspired and schemed to deceive the school’s applicants, students, and donors into believing that the school offered top-ranked business degree programs, so that they would pay tuition and make donations to Temple.” The statement explains that Porat and two other conspirators “agreed to provide false information to U.S. News about the number of Fox’s [on-line MBA (“OMBA”) and part-time MBA (“PMBA”)] students who had taken the Graduate Management Admission Test (“GMAT”); the average work experience of Fox’s PMBA students; and the percentage of Fox students who were enrolled part-time, all because it was believed that better numbers for these metrics would result in better rankings for the programs.”

The scheme to goose the school’s rankings evidently worked, too. The U.S. Attorney statement explains: “Relying on the false information it had received from Fox, U.S. News ranked Fox’s OMBA program Number One in the country four years in a row (2015 – 2018). U.S. News also moved Fox’s PMBA program up its rankings from No. 53 in 2014 to No. 20 in 2015, to No. 16 in 2016, and to No. 7 in 2017.” Porat then touted the rankings in “marketing materials directed at potential Fox students and donors,” and “[e]nrollment in Fox’s OMBA and PMBA programs grew dramatically in a few short years, which led to millions of dollars a year in increased tuition revenues.”

The “rankings” established by publications like U.S. News and World Report have had a profound–and in my view, negative–impact on the world of higher education. Parents and students use them to help in making application decisions, and schools reorient their admissions standards and processes and make other important decisions in an endless quest to better their rankings. The notion that you can boil down the whole college experience, or a law school education, to a ranking based on metrics is absurd on its face, but the rankings give schools something to boast about, or goals to achieve. Never mind the distorting and pernicious effect the zeal for higher rankings might have on a school’s educational mission–or the fact that the rankings have become such a dominant force that they caused one school administrator to apparently engaged in fraudulent conduct.

We’re past the point where our kids are making school decisions, but this incident really makes you wonder how meaningful those rankings really are.

Bottom Phishers

The IT Department at our firm periodically sends out notices about the latest email phishing scams that are making the rounds. “Phishing,” for those of you who are unfamiliar with the term, refers to the efforts of fraudsters to send out emails that purport to be legitimate — like, say, a notice from a reputable bank. The phishers hope to get you to click on a link that either allows them to inject malware into your computer system or asks you to provide personal information, like Social Security numbers or bank account information, that they can then use to defraud you.

In short, phishers are fraudulent scum.

But they are creative, and they make efforts to try to keep up with what is going on in the world. Yesterday, for example, the notice from our IT Department concerned a new phishing email that tried to get the recipient to click on a link that purported to provide information about COVID vaccine scheduling. Like many phishing efforts, this one was oddly phrased and not written in the King’s English and wouldn’t fool most people — but all it takes is a few credulous or concerned people clicking on the link and the fraudsters are off to the races.

As I read the notice from our IT folks, I wondered about what kind of low-life loser would try to take advantage of a global pandemic that has killed hundreds of thousands and the interest in being immunized in order to commit fraud and steal money from worried people. If phishers are low-life scum — and they are — then any phisher who would based a phishing effort on coronavirus vaccine distribution is the lowest of the low. You might call them the bottom phishers, which is apt because the fish that live at the bottom of the ocean are typically the ugliest fish of all.

Don’t be deceived by bottom phishers. If you get an email about a vaccine, don’t just click on a link — call your doctor instead.

2020 Fraud

Every year, it’s a struggle to get the subconscious mind to accept the notion of a new year.  If you write a check or date a document after the turn of the calendar, for example, you might reflexively write the old year for a few weeks until your brain finally assimilates the fact that it’s 2020 and no longer 2019.  Such dating foul-ups are just a standard part of the process of moving from one year to another.

This year there’s another aspect of dating documents that’s been in the news:  potential fraud.  This story from CNN addresses the issue.  According to the article, consumer advocates, auditors, and police departments all are saying that you shouldn’t use the abbreviation/slash approach to writing the date — like, say, 1/5/20 — on documents because a fraudster could get the document and mess with the year by adding digits to the end, so that “1/5/20” becomes “1/5/2019” or “1/5/2021.”

I get the concept, but I’m not clear on how fiddling with the date could practically lead to fraud.  The CNN article gives two examples.  At some point in the future, you might have a check lying around, dated 1/4/20, that is more than six months old.  A crook could take the check, make the date 1/4/2021, so that the check is no longer more than six months old and difficult to cash.  Left unexplained is why in the world anyone would have an old, dated, but otherwise incomplete check lying around, and how a fraudster could find it and forge the rest of the writing to scam you.

Here’s the other example from the CNN article:

“Or, let’s say you sign a credit contract — an agreement between a borrower and a lender — and date it 1/4/20. Say you then miss a month or two of payments, and the lender goes to collect the debt that’s owed. Theoretically, they could add “19” to the end of that date and argue that you owe more than a year’s worth of payments.”

It seems like this example raises a more important concern — don’t borrow money from crooked entities that would consciously commit deliberate fraud.  I’m guessing that any entity that would be willing to engage in such conduct probably wouldn’t stop at fiddling with the date.  In fact, they might send some burly guys to your house ready to take a tire iron to your kneecaps unless you pay up, now.

The CNN article doesn’t give any more plausible examples of potential fraud, saying that it doesn’t want to give crooks any ideas.  I appreciate that, because fraudsters are a creative sort, and I appreciate the warning.  So when I’m writing the date this year, I’ll write it out in full, and enjoy the fact that by doing so I’m thwarting vaguely defined potential fraud.  Even unlikely fraud is better left avoided.

Puppy Fraud

The unfortunate reality is that there are a huge number of scam artists in the world.  There is no fraud too low for them to try, if they think there is money in it, and the internet just makes committing the fraud easier and more anonymous.

The latest evidence of this is reports of puppy scams that prey upon people, often kids, who’ve saved their money to buy a puppy.  The victims go on line looking for the puppy of their dreams, come across a website that promises to provide them with a cute, furry pet, make contact and wire money to arrange for the delivery of a dog — and then no dogs arrive.  Sometimes the fraudsters even double-down, successfully, on hapless victims by telling them that they need to pay even more money for a kennel crate, or insurance, or to correct a delivery mistake.  People are reporting losing hundreds and even thousands of dollars through such swindles.

It’s hard to imagine that anyone would consciously target dog-lovers — especially kids — in criminal fraud schemes, but apparently there are no lines some crooks won’t cross.  If fraudsters don’t mind cheating senior citizens out of their life savings, or bilking new arrivals who’ve come to this country in search of a better life, why would they hesitate to take advantage of a child who has saved money from their summer job to buy a puppy?

The lesson, of course, is to not assume that every internet web page represents a legitimate business.  If you’re going to buy a puppy — or for that matter, anything else — on the internet, do your homework and pay attention to details.  In the story linked above, for example, the Better Business Bureau notes that scam websites often feature misspellings and grammatical errors that a legitimate business would fix.

But to be as safe as possible, why buy a puppy over the internet in the first place?  Your local dog shelter has real dogs, large and small, that are yearning for a home and that you can see, and touch, and pet before you add a new member to the family.

Phone App Flim-Flam

How much do you really know about — and how much should you really trust — the apps that you are downloading and installing on your phone?

Last week I ran across an on-line article with the unnerving headline “Two-thirds of all Android antivirus apps are frauds.”  The article reports on testing that was performed by an Austrian group called AV-Comparatives that specializes in testing antivirus products.  The group looked at 250 Android antivirus apps that were available on the Google Play Store.  It installed the apps on phones, then tried to download malicious software that was in use last year and therefore should be detected by any decent, functioning antivirus app.

The testing found that more than half of the apps didn’t work as advertised.  Many didn’t “scan” and analyze the code of the downloaded software at all, and instead just checked the title of the software against “whitelists” and “blacklists.”  As a result, some antivirus apps found themselves to be malware because the developers forgot to include them on the “whitelist” of approved software.  In addition, some apps were easily fooled because package names that included references to reputable software creators, like “com.adobe,” could bypass the software and permit malware to be installed without detection.

In all, the Austrian group found that 170 of the 250 antivirus apps failed the basic detection tests and were either ineffective or unsafe.  AV-Comparatives concluded that many of the apps were developed by amateurs or were basically being used as platforms for ads and were not legitimate antivirus protection.

I use an Apple iPhone, so I’m not directly affected by issues with Android antivirus apps, but the testing of the antivirus apps raises a more basic question — how are apps being screened, and how much of what is made available to the general public, on either a free or paid basis, is valid and works as advertised?  And, even worse, is anyone trustworthy actually looking at the apps to see whether they are vehicles for getting access to personal phones for fraudulent purposes?  How does anyone know that the app they are downloading isn’t a technological Trojan horse?

Porn On The Federal Payroll

A television station in Washington, D.C. sent a Freedom of Information Act request to 12 federal agencies.  The FOIA request, directed to the inspector generals of the 12 agencies, sought records of cases of “egregious on-the-job pornography” viewing by federal employees at the 12 agencies.

In response, the inspector generals produced records showing that almost 100 federal employees at the 12 agencies were caught, or admitted to, watching vast amounts of porn while at work.  One employee, at the Environmental Protection Agency offices in Washington, D.C., said he had spent up to six hours a day watching porn for “several years.”  A patent and trademark employee at the Department of Commerce was found to have made 1,800 connections to pornographic websites and told investigators, by way of explanation:  “When I am working hard, I go to these images to take a mental break.”  A worker at the Federal Railroad Administration was found to have searched for porn for 252 hours in one year.  And some of the cases addressed in the inspector general records were criminal in nature, because they involved viewing child pornography.

Watching porn on the job apparently falls within the category of “computer misuse,” which is subject to different penalties at different federal agencies, with sanctions ranging from a written reprimand to suspensions and termination.  As one deputy assistant inspector general put it, the computer systems, and the employees, are supposed to be performing government work while on the job, and checking out porn instead constitutes some of the “waste, fraud, and abuse” we taxpayers often hear politicians talk about.  Notably, the TV station report provides no information on whether disciplinary action was taken against the supervisors of the employee who says he spent six hours a day watching porn on his work computer for several years without being detected, or whether the EPA concluded that his job clearly wasn’t necessary and could be eliminated.

About 100 employees out of the vast payrolls of the 12 federal agencies obviously isn’t a huge percentage; you’re going to find a few “bad apples” in just about any workplace.  But the TV station FOIA request was targeted specifically at “egregious” porn viewing, and the fact that federal employees can spend hours watching porn on the job watching pornography, undetected, just adds fuel to the budget-cutting and payroll-cutting fire.  President Trump’s budget plans already have federal employees worried that federal payrolls are going to be slashed.  Don’t be surprised if, in the debate about downsizing the federal government, bureaucratic porn-watching habits get trotted out as a talking point.

Don’t Get To “Yes”

Fraudsters and scammers are wily pieces of crap who are basically the scum of the earth.  But you have to grudgingly give them credit:  you never know what they’re going to think of next, and when it comes to taking criminal advantage of the decency and kindheartedness of many people, they have no equal.

Consider what police are saying about the latest scam.  You get a phone call out of the blue from a number that your phone identifies as from your area code, making you much more likely to answer it because it could be a friend or family member calling in an emergency from a strange local number.  The person on the other ends starts yakking, and early in the conversation the person says “Can you hear me?”  Most people, of course, will say “yes” — and that starts them on the road to perdition.

Why?  Because your “yes” answer is recorded, and then used to indicate your assent to some unwanted product or service.  And if you try to argue that you never agreed to get that magazine subscription or internet debugging service, the recording of your “yes” answer gets used as evidence that you in fact agreed.  In the worst case, the scammer has your credit card number and uses the “yes” with a third party to authorize charges for goods that the crook gets but you are billed for.

It’s tough, because many of us are trained to be polite, even in response to an unwanted call.  We listen to the pitch about the charitable opportunity or the policeman’s benevolent fund and look for an opportunity to say, “thanks, but no thanks.”  But now the advice from law enforcement is to not say anything — and if you’re asked “Can you hear me?,” hang up immediately.

In this case, you just don’t want to get to “yes.”

Have A Happy Wi-Fi Christmas

You go to the food court at a mall, a coffee shop, or some other public space over the holidays, open your laptop or power up your tablet, and start checking for available wi-fi.  When you see a “free” network, you click on it with a chuckle, take a hearty sip of your peppermint stick latte, go through your email, and then start making sure your checking account is squared away before you buy gifts for the last people on your Christmas list.

What’s wrong with this picture?

Pretty much everything, say data security experts.  It turns out that fraudsters love to set up fake “free” wi-fi networks at public spaces over the holidays, hoping that busy shoppers taking a break, or the bored people accompanying them, will use the networks and expose their personal data, whether it’s passwords, bank or credit card information, or personal data that could lead to identity theft.  Many people who routinely use “free” public wi-fi networks are altogether too trusting, and are willing to agree to just about any terms to get the internet access they crave.

In fact, as the story linked above reports, an 11-year-old kid in Texas won his school science fair this year by proving that point.  He set up anonymous free internet access portals in shopping mall food court areas that had the most draconian conditions available — including allowing the portals to do things like “reading and responding to your emails” and “monitoring of input and/or output” — and more than half of the people offered those conditions agreed to them.  That’s a pretty stiff price for something that supposed to be “free.”

Hackers are everywhere (just ask Yahoo!) and are eager to get to your personal data.  So please:  use precautions and common sense.  Don’t go onto just any “free” network and start exposing your most important and intimate personal and financial data to whoever might have set up that network, or hacked into it.  Think about whether the network really seems to be bona fide.   And consider whether some activities — like on-line banking — really should be exclusively reserved for a network you know and trust.

This holiday season, don’t get ho-ho-hacked.

The Fakes And Cheaters World

Sometimes diverse news stories coalesce to sound a deeper, underlying theme.

This week we’ve witnessed the curious ongoing story about Rachel Dolezal, the former NAACP chapter president who says she self-identifies as black, and the disclosure that the FBI and federal prosecutors are investigating the St. Louis Cardinals for hacking into the database of the Houston Astros to obtain confidential player information.  And The Week has a fascinating story about a business in the Philippines where people spend their workdays manufacturing fake people on Facebook — using a “fake name generator” website — and then using those fake people to sell fake likes to people or businesses who want to look more popular on social media than they actually are.

What’s the deeper theme here?  That my grandmother was right when she said “believe half of what you see and none of what you hear.”  It’s a fakes and cheaters world out there, and we all would do well to maintain a healthy skepticism about . . . well, virtually everything.  Even in the sporting world, where you would like to think that hard work, training, and talent on the field of play ultimately will be decisive, teams apparently aren’t above doing whatever it takes to gain an edge.

I’m not a Pollyanna about how the world used to be; I know that there have always been fraudsters and scammers and hustlers who make their living through lies and deception.  But we seem to have crossed a line now, and there is a big difference between throwing spitballs and stealing signs on one hand and hacking into another team’s computer systems on the other.  Falsifying and airbrushing and cheating seem to have become almost routine in everyday life, and distinguishing the legitimate from the illegitimate has become much more difficult. Can you trust anything you see on a resume anymore?  Should you give credence to any data about Twitter followers or Facebook likes?  What about reported corporate financial results, or government budget figures?  How deep, exactly, does the culture of counterfeiting, and the ethical rot that accompanies it, go?

Rachel Dolezal isn’t apologizing for what she has done, and says she would do the same things again. She says “the discussion is really about what it is to be human,” and she hopes “that can drive at the core of definitions of race, ethnicity, culture, self determination, personal agency and, ultimately, empowerment.”  Huh?  We’re now supposed to have a “dialogue” about what, exactly?  That we are all “empowered” to “self-determine” and represent ourselves in any way we choose, regardless of reality?

Uncle Sam, The Scooter Sap

Over the weekend the Washington Post carried a terrific article about how fraudsters ripped off Medicare — and through Medicare, the American taxpayer — in the Great Scooter Scam.  It’s another troubling, cautionary tale that shows how good intentions can run awry, how fraudsters are always ready to pounce, and how our ponderous governmental apparatus is just not well-suited to ferreting out fraud.

The fraud scheme grew out of Medicare’s requirement that claims be paid promptly, and the vast scope of coverage that Medicare supplies.  With millions of claims being received, there was no way to check them out before making the required prompt processing decision.  So Medicare’s default approach was to pay claims first, investigate later.  The fraudsters learned this, and rubbed their hands with glee.  But fraudsters can’t perform surgery or other medical care, so how do they take advantage of that gaping vulnerability in the system?  Medical equipment was the answer . . . but the crooks then had to find just the right kind of equipment, where real money could be made.

Ultimately, they realized that scooters and motorized wheelchairs were perfect.  The need for them was plausible, and there was a huge gap between the actual cost of the devices and the inflated amount Medicare would pay.  The fraudsters created elaborate schemes that included “recruiters” who identified seniors to receive the scooters and bogus medical supply companies — and seniors who willingly participated because they thought there were getting a freebie, even if it was something that they didn’t need.  When Medicare changed the rules to require in-person doctor visits to try to stop the fraud, the crooks recruited doctors who were willing to participate in the fraud in exchange for a cut.

The result?  Perfectly able-bodied seniors with wheelchairs, still in their wrapping, gathering dust in their garages or serving as the perch for oversized teddy bears.  Seniors riffing on the Seinfeld episode and having scooter races in their neighborhoods.  And huge amounts of federal money lining the pockets of criminals.

The scope of the fraud is astonishing.  The Medicare system has paid billions for motorized wheelchairs, and they don’t even know how many of the purchases are legitimate.  One recent audit of paid bills showed that 80 percent were improper.  And even after the federal government became aware of the scooter scam, in 1998, it continued to pay billions in phony claims.  Since 1999, Medicare has paid $8.2 billion for 2.7 million motorized wheelchairs and scooters.  In 2003 alone, $964 million was spend on the devices.  These seem like huge numbers, but they are only a blip in the vast Medicare system — which is part of the reason why it took so long to meaningfully tackle the problem.

The Medicare system now says that it has effectively addressed the scooter scam, and the amounts spent on motorized wheelchairs fell to only $190 million in 2013.  Should we have confidence that all of that money — and all of the billions of dollars shelled out for other forms of medical equipment — is being spent in response to legitimate medical needs?  Not really.  The system is too large, oversight is minimal, and there are too many gaps where the fraudsters can take advantage.  And, perhaps most distressingly, there apparently are lots of “recruiters,” doctors, and seniors who apparently are all too willing to participate in a criminal scam so long as they get something out of it.

The Washington Post article about the Great Scooter Scam should be required reading for every Member of Congress who thinks the best way to solve a problem is to create a governmental program that pays out money to address it.

Fraud From The Boiler Room

This week a police operation in Great Britain and the EU resulted in arrests of more than 100 people who allegedly were involved in “boiler room” operations, where callers solicit investments in fraudulent financial schemes or sell stock that doesn’t exist. The SEC, too, routinely prosecutes people who are determined to be involved in boiler room schemes to swindle investors. Often these schemes bilk hapless seniors of their retirement funds.

I’ve received “boiler room” type calls. Typically the caller talks very fast with a New York accent (I’ve always assumed the accent is part of the job training, just like being an airline pilot requires that you speak with a certain folksiness), explains they are with an investment outfit you’ve never heard of, and then says they’ve got just one opportunity they want you to consider. There’s always some hook that makes the investment sound plausible and can be described in 30 seconds — development of oil sands, a company that’s about to be awarded a development contract in Qatar — and then the ask that you give them this one chance to show that they can make a huge return for you.

I always listen politely, because I watched Glengarry Glen Ross and felt sorry for the Jack Lemmon character, and then decline. If they start to get especially pushy and belligerent — and that’s not unusual — I just hang up. They’re wasting their time with me, because I would never dream of giving any of my hard-earned money to a complete stranger who calls out of the blue. However, some people do invest, to their eventual regret, which is why boiler room operations have been a staple of the fraudster arsenal for decades.

Many of the victims are senior citizens. Why are so many older people easier to scam? Research suggests that the elderly are more likely to open junk mail about get-rich-quick schemes and interact with cold callers, and that the aging brain is less able to appreciate risk. In short, they put themselves in a position to be hoodwinked, react positively to the promises of outlandish returns on their money, and lack the filters that would allow them to recognize the downside risk and danger that they are being defrauded.

If you’ve ever known an anguished and humiliated senior citizen who was taken advantage of by a boiler room operation, you know that there is a special level of hell reserved for crooks who prey on the elderly, rob them of their life savings, and leave them facing an impoverished retirement.

How Best To Protect The Elderly?

The percentage of our population that is elderly — and often infirm as well — is growing.  As that percentage of the population grows, the number of elderly who are hoodwinked out of their retirement nest egg, neglected, or emotionally or physically abused, is growing steadily as well.

Senior abuse is a tough problem to quantify.  Statistics, surveys, and expert opinions vary, with estimates of victims numbering in the millions, but the reality is hard to grasp because the problem is largely a hidden one.  Many seniors spend their time indoors — due to health or choice — and aren’t seen in public often.  How are neighbors to know if the apparently devoted son who stops by every second day isn’t abusing his confused mother and looting her bank account?  How many seniors are too embarrassed and ashamed by their treatment to confess that their niece or grandson is threatening and assaulting them?  And there is a definitional problem, too.  How do you treat the fiercely independent older couple where the husband insists he can care for his ailing wife, but family friends notice their hygiene and general health noticeably slipping?  Are they being neglected, or is their fervent wish for independence simply being honored?  How are we to know, too, if the money that is vanishing from the aging parent’s bank account is disappearing due to fraud, or to a legitimate wish to help relatives who are down on their luck, or to pay for an expensive form of treatment or drug therapy?

The elderly are a ripe target for crime and abuse.  They often have life savings to plunder, and they receive a monthly Social Security check.  They may be weak, wheelchair-bound, or suffering through the early stages of debilitating mental or physical illness.  Their social support network of friends, family, and co-workers may have fallen away as a result of retirements, departures to warmer climates, and deaths.  If a relative moves in to help Great Aunt Alice, is it a wonderful act of human kindness or a precursor to abuse and financial exploitation?

There’s always pressure for a federal solution, but it’s hard to see how a national bureaucracy could effectively address this problem.  The best answer seems to be vigilant neighbors, friends, and family members who are alert to signs of abuse and willing to report their suspicions to local authorities.  Financial fraud is a crime, as is physical assault, and they should be treated and prosecuted as such.  We should all be observant and sensitive to seniors who may desperately need our help and who deserve not to be terrorized or defrauded in their twilight years.

Gram Scam

Every grandkid knows that if they are in a pinch and really need money, they can always make a discreet withdrawal from the Bank of Grandma.  Unfortunately, fraudsters have learned that same lesson and are using that knowledge to prey on the elderly and bilk them out of their retirement savings.

Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine has been warning of scams that follow this story line.  The unsuspecting senior citizen receives a frantic phone call from a young person purporting to be their grandchild or some other relation.  The terrified kid is in an awful jam — maybe he needs money to get out of jail, or to pay a spring break hotel bill because his friends skipped town on him — and he’s counting on Grandma or Grandpa to help him out by wiring some money right away.  He didn’t want to call Mom or Dad, because they’ll never forgive him, and he knows Grandma and Grandpa will keep his secret.  And he’ll pay the money back, of course.  The worried grandparent, secretly pleased to be of help, goes to the bank or Western Union to send the money, and they never see that money again.

It’s pathetic, of course, that crooks would consciously try to cheat older people, but they’ve been doing so since the dawn of time.  What’s really heartbreaking is that the defrauded grandparents are so trusting, and have such strong senses of familial obligation, that they are inclined to send thousands of dollars on the basis of a single phone call from a person whose voice they obviously don’t know and who claims to be a relative they haven’t talked to in months.  Perhaps each of us should call the elders of our families — not only to alert them to this scam, but also to re-acquaint them with the sounds of our voices.