A well-timed question saved an elderly Waukegan-area couple from falling prey to the so-called grandparent scam that exploits seniors’ devotion to family by making them believe a loved one has been involved in an emergency and needs cash immediately.
The couple, who chose not to be identified, recently received an early morning phone call from someone claiming to be their 18-year-old grandson, who was vacationing with his parents in Mexico. “All of a sudden, he started to bawl and said he was in jail in Mexico,” said the grandmother, 77. The caller (“who sounded like my grandson, but it was harder to tell after he started crying”) claimed that he had been in a minor car accident but that police had found a small bag of marijuana in the car and now he was in jail and needed $3,900 for bail.
“I thought that this was very questionable and that maybe this is a farce,” she said. “But then again, maybe it wasn’t.”
She asked to speak to the police officer, who told her where to send a MoneyGram. After she hung up, she “practically pushed my husband out the door” to go to the bank to withdraw the money. But “light bulbs went off in my head,” said the grandfather, 82. He had detected a brogue on the supposedly Mexican police officer, and when he went to the bank, a teller related that his grandparents had received a similar type of call claiming that he had been kidnapped.
The grandfather withdrew the money just in case. When the scammers called him back (they’d provided him with a callback number, but he later discovered it was a fax number), he directed the man to ask his “grandson” where he was going to go to college in the fall. “I heard a click; end of story,” he said.
The “grandparent scam” is on the rise, according to Susan Grant, director of consumer protection for the Consumer Federation of America, but, she cautions, scammers do not limit themselves to senior citizens. They use social networks such as Facebook to gather information, hack into email address books or just place random calls or emails. They tend to call in the middle of the night or early in the morning to catch victims in a disoriented state.
“You have to be on guard if all of a sudden someone contacts you and says they have an emergency,” Grant cautioned. “Verify with someone else before you do anything, especially if you are invariably told to use a money transfer. That’s like putting cash in an envelope. There’s no way to trace it and no way to get it back.”
To learn more, visit the Consumer Federation of America website (consumerfed.org/fraud).