Public Service Announcement

Beware the bandits, they are coming for you

Appearing now in a phone near you

When you become eligible for Senior discounts, an amazing thing happens. You become invisible. Clerks in stores no longer see you frantically trying to summon them, and in crowded situations people push past you as if your age was contagious. Which of course, it is. But there is one group of people that not only see you, they want to engage with you.

It’s not your friendship or company they want, but your money. Email was once a favored means of contact, but everyone knows the Nigerian prince story, so it doesn’t work very well. Now the telephone is a popular tool for wealth extraction. Technology allows any number you want to be displayed as the ID of the caller. Your carrier, T-Mobile in my case, may add a helpful line as well, such as “Telemarketer”. Unfortunately this is not reliable, and I’ve let calls go to voice mail that I actually would have taken if they had not been falsely tagged that way.

Recently my wife got a call with the ID of “Credit Center”. The caller claimed to be calling to advise her that someone was opening an account in her name. This is absurd, given that we have frozen our credit with all three agencies. To allow access to our data requires a number of hoops to be jumped through. So she hung up. Immediately he called again. And again. Finally I answered and claimed to be a member of the local police department. Immediately the caller hung up and we did not hear from him again.

A few days later I got a call, again with the caller ID proclaiming “Credit Agency”. I knew it was a scam, answered, told them so, and hung up. Immediately another call from a completely different number, but the same guy. I gave him some well chosen words, ending with “…and the horse you rode in on.” That seems to have ended the scam, at least for the moment. I did a search for the number listed in the caller ID, and discovered it actually is an agency for checking credit. But it is specifically used by landlords to check the credit of prospective renters. A banner across the top of the site specifically says they will never call you, and any calls that appear to be from their number are not valid.

A new one has taken its place, and it’s both infuriating and clever. Here in the US we’re facing the election from Hell, as Bari Weiss so eloquently calls it. The country is almost evenly divided between the two candidates, and no matter which one wins, half the country will be furious. The scammers have seized upon this, and have been sending multiple texts every day, much like these:

Each of the text messages in this spam flood originates from a different number. Following the web links is risky, since they could lead to installing of malware. I maintain a virtual machine for tracking such things. The linked sites appear to be Republican and Democratic Party sponsored, but such things are easily faked. I am only registered with one party, so it’s suspicious that I’m getting pitches from both. The similarity of the messages, urgent wording, and dodgy origin suggests these are not sponsored by either party, and may actually be scammers trying to trick people into sending donations to them rather than the actual political party. In each case I have tapped the Report Junk link, which deletes the text and reports it as junk. This has slowly reduced the volume of them.

There’s also a long-term con initiated by text message. You may receive something like this, from an unknown number:

“Mary, I’m running late. I need you to pick up the kids from school.”

You’re not Mary, you have no idea who this sender is, but you are hit with the fear of children being put in danger because of this misdirected message. So you might be inclined to immediately answer and explain the error to protect them. This results in a profuse apology for the error, and a heartfelt message of appreciation from the sender for averting a possible tragedy. You go on, with a feeling of satisfaction for accomplishing a good deed. A few days later, another text arrives from the same sender, just letting you know again how grateful he or she is for your kindness. It may also explain that the reason for running late was a chemotherapy session that ran long, or some other cause to elicit even more sympathy from you. You may be asked for your address, so friend of Mary can send you a token of appreciation. The whole goal here is to strike a friendship, through which personal information can be extracted.

Seniors are vulnerable to this kind of con, since most of us are parents, and maybe even grandparents, and we’re inclined to help. But if we step back a moment, and think about it, something isn’t quite right here. What kind of person has a friend or family member (Mary) that isn’t in their contacts, so they have to enter her phone number manually? Why not just call dear Mary? If this were a real message, wouldn’t the sender follow up when Mary did not reply?

From time to time I receive text messages from people who want to sell real estate of mine. In the case of the home I’m living in, I chalk it up to a realtor who is desperate for a sale and is trying to hustle up some leads. But in cases where the property is a home I sold more than 25 years ago, or a commercial space that I leased some 20 years ago, I suspect it’s a scam. Anyone who has the address of a former home of mine should already have been able to confirm that it’s owned by someone else. The same goes for commercial property that I have never owned. I suspect the goal is to prompt me to contact them on the hope of making money for nothing. This falls under P. T. Barnum’s proverb of “You can’t cheat an honest man.” If you go for the scam, there will be money requested for paperwork or legal services, or some other excuse. The sale will never happen, and your money will evaporate along with the scammer. If in some rare twist, the scammer actually does execute a sale, you as the seller will be legally liable for the inevitable fallout when the truth is discovered.

Suppose you come home and find some unexpected packages waiting for you. Perhaps they are from Amazon. The packages are addressed to you, but you did not order anything. Opening them reveals inexpensive items, such as kitchen gadgets, office supplies, or other mundane items. What’s going on here? If these items were from Amazon you should immediately change the password on your account. Do the same if they are from any other company. In this case the scammer has gotten your login credentials from data that was gathered from a website hack. By sending small, cheap orders to you, they can then log in using your credentials and leave 5 star reviews. This gives them credibility and allows them to sell more cheap junk by tricking people into believing it is good on the basis of these fake reviews. Notify the shipper, be it Amazon, eBay, or other e-commerce entity. They can then shut down the scam operation. Federal law says you do not need to return the items. You can keep them or throw them away.

There will always be folks who think they need your money more than you do. The items I’ve noted above are but a drop in an ocean of schemes. If you’ve reached an age where sorting the legitimate from the fraud is a struggle, enlist the help of a family member or friend, a decade or more younger, for help. Boomers, and even some Gen-X people, were born when computers were still ideas on the drawing board, and there is no shame in lacking the skills to discern real from fake. Heed the words of Sgt. Phil from Hill Street Blues: