The arrival of autumn signals a fresh season of scammers. Besides their greed, this cadre of low-life scum has become much more sophisticated in the past few years. Maybe we can blame the pandemic for putting us on our phones and computers in our quest for connection through social media. Seniors seem more susceptible to scams than younger folks because most of us are more prone to trust that others have good intentions and because we may not be as astute with technology.
As tech-savvy as I consider myself, even I have fallen victim recently to an online impersonator. Luckily, he didn’t get my money, but here’s how it happened:
A unique example of Facebook fan page cloning
My cousin, a big-time music fan and concertgoer, alerted me to a musician she follows who was seeking someone to translate song lyrics from Portuguese into English. She thought of me since I had been a Peace Corps volunteer eons ago in Brazil. She sent me a link to the musician’s Facebook fan page and I connected with who I thought was the recording artist himself. He responded and wanted to communicate on Messenger only. Okay, no problem.
We exchanged pleasantries and he outlined what he was seeking. He gave me the name of the song that had been recorded many years ago by a Brazilian singer. I got on YouTube, downloaded the lyrics in Portuguese, and did the translation. To help the singer out further, I recorded an MP3 file of me saying the lyrics in Portuguese so he could get the correct pronunciation because he wanted to record the song in both English and Portuguese.
When I had willingly completed the task, just satisfied to dust off my rusty Portuguese and do it for nothing, I thought we had finished our communications. But suddenly, he had another set of song lyrics he wanted translated. And he started asking for a lot of personal information. Nothing to set off alarm bells, but enough to raise my eyebrows and wonder why he wanted to know my favorite singers, my dreams, and aspirations.
When I thought we had finally ended our collaboration, he wanted to know if I’d like to donate to his fan club by buying a “fan privilege package,” to the tune of $3,000. In exchange, I’d receive preferred seating at his concerts, a backstage pass, and a free newsletter.
No, thank you. I had spent hours doing the translations and recordings and responding to his annoying personal messages. It was time to block the man and do some research. I discovered he had cloned the real musician’s Facebook fan page and began impersonating him. I was not the only person who thought they were following and commenting on the real musician’s posts.
The old PCH scam
My husband is a Publishers Clearing House fanatic. I’ve watched him go through all those little glossy individual advertisements and pull out a few items that he thinks we really, really need. He likes cleaning gadgets (what is he trying to tell me, I wonder?) And he’s been known to unwittingly subscribe to monthly deliveries of tins of nuts and candies. Once we consume the contents of the cute little decorator tins, down to a basement shelf they go. I try to re-gift them every holiday season by filling them with homemade goodies, but we don’t have that many giftees. Someday soon they will be donated to the local thrift store.
This is all to say that my husband’s addiction to PCH has put him on an electronic hit list. I came home from a hair appointment the other day to find him fuming in anger. For the second time in the past four years, he’d received a call from someone claiming to be from Publishers Clearing House telling him that he’d won the big prize. All he had to do was go to the local Walgreens or Walmart and buy a gift card to pay the taxes on his winnings.
Even before we married, I had to alert this intelligent but trusting man to a scam he’d fallen for while using his laptop. He got a flashing message on his desktop that his Microsoft program had become corrupted and expired and he needed to renew it or lose all his files. This involved turning over his computer to them so they could remotely update the program, but only after coughing up $395 and his bank routing and account numbers. The result of this scam? He stopped using the old laptop that the scammers now had total control and access to. He bought a new one instead and now ignores those annoying popup warning messages. And he knows how to block the popups with some system settings.
The worst scam of all
The absolute worst, most heartbreaking scam happened with a friend and neighbor. My husband was helping him locate a used tractor with a cab so the friend would not be so exposed to the winter elements when taking hay to his livestock.
My husband has helped other friends and neighbors locate parts or machinery online because he is more tech-savvy than many of them. And I may have even helped too by looking at Facebook Marketplace for tractors for sale. We located one, which was not for sale anywhere close to where we live. But it was a good price. In fact, the price was half of what it should have been but involved a widow who had no use for it.
The local rancher made arrangements through my husband to wire the money to a bank in New York and then received instructions about the shipment and delivery of the tractor to a nearby town. The shipping was allegedly being handled by eBay. A date was set for delivery…a delivery that never happened.
We contacted the local sheriff, the FBI, and the attorney general’s office after the tractor didn’t show up. Despite repeated calls to the so-called seller (why do they all have foreign accents?) and eventually a recorded message saying the number had been discontinued, the thousands of dollars spent for a tractor were not returned to the friend’s bank account.
We all learned a painful lesson; namely,
- If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
- It’s easy to clone a reputable website.
- Online marketplaces are not good at policing the items offered for sale on their sites. The best thing to do if you fall victim to something that is not represented honestly on such sites is to report it. After our scam, we saw the same tractor for sale again with only slightly different details. We reported it and eventually, it was taken down.
Other than learning through painful experiences, and seeing friends scammed, I’m no expert at the nefarious plots scammers have concocted to separate seniors from their retirement funds and savings. If you want more details, check online sources, including https://www.ncoa.org/article/what-are-the-top-online-scams-targeting-older-adults/
That’s it for this public service blog. Just be wary as the holiday season approaches. And don’t believe any unsolicited or solicited claim that your antivirus software needs to be updated or you’ll lose all your data. What you’ll stand to lose is your peace of mind and your money if you click on that link or follow that verbal command.
Not everyone is as nice as you are.