Ho, ho, hold me up! The FBI is warning grandparents that the agency is seeing an uptick in scams that impact their generation. And with a whack, too. Between the two scams, the agency says it’s counted nearly $2 million moving from a senior's pocket to a scammer’s pocket.
The setup and the knockdown
Grandparent scams are anything but new, but they have proven effective in the past and now with artificial intelligence (AI), even more so with things like AI-manipulated Medicare scams. Now that the holidays are upon us, scammers are leaning those grandparent scams toward travel.
The narrative often plays out like this, the FBI says:
Initial contact
Fraudsters contact senior citizens and pose as their grandchildren, who are supposedly in jail after causing a car accident. Some accidents involve diplomats or pregnant women.
Follow-up contact
Another scammer then enters the scene, contacts Granny or Gramps, posing as the grandchild's attorney, and requests payment for legal fees, bond money, or medical expenses for a purportedly injured person involved in the accident.
Further requests
Here’s where it gets interesting. Scammers instruct the grandparent to keep this thing on the downlow and maintain secrecy, sometimes going as far as referring to a judge-imposed gag order, which, if broken, will result in the grandchild going to jail or incurring more fines.
In some situations, scammers may also request additional money because of a serious injury or a fatality resulting from the alleged accident.
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Methods of payment
Scammers tell the grandparent to send funds via wire transfer; cash, packaged in magazines or books, and sent through the U.S. mail; or to provide the money to willing or unsuspecting couriers, such as Uber or Lyft drivers, who retrieve the money in person at the grandparent’s house.
And the use of those ridesharing services adds a legitimacy that tends to throw people off. So much in fact that seniors report losing $32,000, $98,000, and $700,000 in separate rideshare-related grandparent scams.
CBS’ 60 Minutes’ Sharyn Alfonsi shared how this scam played out with real grandparents.
What Uber is doing to stop this
Scams like this where there's a "money drop" and involving a rideshare service put Uber in a corner and it had no choice but to fight its way out of the situation.
It's doubtful that a targeted person can ask a company like Uber or Lyft to give them the name and address of where their money is being transported, but Uber is attempting to cut those crooks off at the pass with cyber intelligence of its own.
The company recently deployed surveillance that enables its Public Safety team to scan for digital fingerprints of the fraudsters. Recently, Uber teamed up with the Brevard County Sheriff's Office to stop one of those scammers in their tracks.
Tips to protect yourself
There are several ways to protect yourself from getting involved in this scam. The simplest is just not answering telephone calls from numbers you don’t recognize.
But the best protection if the scammer gets you on the phone and starts their woe-is-me spiel and asks for money is to hang up the phone and call your grandchild, or whoever is supposed to be in trouble directly to verify what’s going on.
“If you cannot reach them, call someone else in your family, even if scammers told you to keep it secret,” the FBI suggests, adding this social media tip:
“Limit the personally identifiable information you post on social media and dating websites. Scammers may use this information to create a convincing story.”
Photo Credit: Consumer Affairs News Department Images
Posted: 2023-12-01 16:24:51