Home » News & Events » Stopping a $40,000 Scam
He was drawn in by a very sophisticated operation, and it took a lot of logic to convince him it wasn’t real
The call came in the middle of the afternoon when I was working—an 80-year-old relative was on the phone with scammers and could not be convinced the scenario was a fake. He had been talking to people who he thought were representatives from his bank and the Federal Trade Commission, and was convinced he owed $40,000. They implored him not to tell anybody, that he had to stay on the line and that he needed to arrange for prepaid debit cards that somebody would pick up from him at his house.
He and his wife had gotten dressed and were ready to head to the bank to make a withdrawal, when she drew the line on the secrecy the scammers asked for and called her son, who called me, because elder scams fall under my purview as a personal-finance expert. I called back on her cellphone and was briefed on the situation and convinced her to put him on the phone.
He was out of breath and his voice was thin—he was just out of the hospital and taking a stew of medications. I told him this was absolutely a scam, even a well-known and documented one—the FTC scam—and that it was very easy to fall prey to it. Scams are so prevalent today that Pew Research estimated that 73% of Americans have experienced some type of fraud, amounting to more than $16 billion in losses in 2024. Seniors are particularly vulnerable because of cognitive decline and isolation, and rack up more than $3 billion annually of those losses, according to the FBI. My relative was not convinced, though, so we went through the points one by one.
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