My mother suffers from what appears to be early stage dementia but remains relatively self-sufficient, at least for now. Her condition so far is manifested in occasional short-term memory loss and periods where she becomes confused about why she is doing something: opening the refrigerator, entering a room, writing a check, for example. Thanks to the internet it is not particularly difficult to determine her advanced age and trace down members of her family, including myself and my children, along with our addresses and approximate ages. This week I visited her along with my father, who is physically disabled but still fairly sharp, mentally speaking, at the house where they’ve lived for the past 50-odd years. We spent a lot of time putting their medications into those clear little box trays, separated by each day of the week.
On my way home I got a call from her. She was quite upset, actually totally beside herself, in fact. It seems my son had called her and told her that he had been involved in a car accident. He was being held under arrest, charged with “reckless endangerment” and “criminal negligence.” The car he was driving struck another being driven by a woman who was pregnant, and she’d been hospitalized as a result. My son said he couldn’t reach either me or his mother (my wife) and he was desperate. He needed $17,000 to post bail and get out of jail. He told my mom that the money would be returned as soon as he could get out and talk to me. He needed a credit card number or a possibly a number for her checking account. She told my son that she would attempt to contact me, and then someone else’s voice came on the line, reiterating what my son had just told her. By now in a complete meltdown, she asked who he was.
I’ll stop here, because by now you know where this is going. The “grandparent” scam is one of the most common phone fraud scams targeting older Americans.
As discussed by AARP:
Grandparent scams typically work something like this: The victim gets a call from someone posing as his or her grandchild. This person explains, in a frantic-sounding voice, that he or she is in trouble: There’s been an accident, or an arrest, or a robbery. To up the drama and urgency, the caller might claim to be hospitalized or stuck in a foreign country; to make the impersonation more convincing, he or she will throw in a few family particulars, gleaned from the actual grandchild’s social media activity.
The impostor offers just enough detail about where and how the emergency happened to make it seem plausible and perhaps turns the phone over to another scammer who pretends to be a doctor, police officer or lawyer and backs up the story. The “grandchild” implores the target to wire money immediately, adding an anxious plea: “Don’t tell Mom and Dad!”
These scams have propagated and multiplied during the COVID-19 pandemic as people, particularly elderly people, are more socially isolated and emotionally vulnerable. Many victims have been bilked out of thousands of dollars, succumbing to the scammers’ pleas that they “act immediately.”
In my case my son had posted pictures of him and his grandmother on Instagram, and may have otherwise inadvertently divulged some personal identifying information. In fact, this is the second time this has occurred—the other instance was directed to my father, who ended up driving for hours to our home to personally ask me what had occurred with my son. At that time I looked the scam up and printed off a couple articles about it. We also reported it to the local police where he lives since that instance involved someone impersonating a police officer. Feeling foolish, he returned home and showed the articles to my mother, but she no longer recalls the incident.
The scammers target older people like my mother and father because they come from a different, simpler time when such activity was fairly incomprehensible. They are among the final generation who know next to nothing about the internet, having made a deliberate (and perhaps unfortunate) choice not to engage with it. For them it’s just a strange, intimidating thing foisted upon them without their ever asking for it. They only know “everyone else has it” and they seem to be told at every turn that their lives are now second-class for their failure to adapt to it. It’s impossible for them to conceive of how easily someone could retrieve their children’s and grandchildren’s information, and it’s equally impossible for them to conceive the kind of venal mentality that would prompt someone to use such information in this manner.
And that’s what is particularly infuriating about these scammers to me. Scammers and con men have always existed (in fact, this country elected one as president fairly recently) so the existence of deceitfulness and greed untethered by any moral sense among certain types of people is nothing unusual. What truly bothers me is the unseen but profound impact these types of cons have on older people, particularly ones who, like my mother, have grown up without much in the way of worldly sophistication or education. She still has a naive sort of trust that people are basically decent human beings and something like this is particularly traumatic for her, because it ruins that perception and replaces it with a palpable sense of distrust and fear. That is not something she needs at this point in her life; she has enough physical problems and emotional challenges just caring for herself and my father. Adding to that heightened distrust is the sense of embarrassment that she has been suckered, made a fool of, and that she believed and almost fell for the scam. It makes her feel stupid (even though she’s anything but), and that really hurts.
After my mom asked who the person was, and after she advised my “son” that she would call me first, the caller hung up. My mother had quite unintentionally foiled him. The scam didn’t work this time, but he has a long list and a script right in front of him. He’s probably calling someone else as you read this.
The AARP article has a good list of things you should not do if you or someone you care about receives one of these calls. You don’t want to rely on the Caller ID number; you don’t want to be the first to say your grandchild’s name, and above all, you don’t want to provide any financial information, credit card, bank or checking account data, or anything else. The best advice is to just hang up, as hard as that may be, and call the grandchild or their parent or caregiver immediately, just to ensure the call was fake. Call whoever you can trust to ascertain the truth, and if someone identifies themselves as police, call that police department to verify his existence. You can also report the incident to your local police, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), your state’s Attorney General’s office or consumer protection office. And if you have children or grandchildren, ask them to adjust their privacy settings on social media to keep their personal information as private as possible.
I know Mom still feels embarrassed and hurt. It’s just another blow to her already fragile state. I also know what I feel toward these people and—rest assured—it does not include embarrassment. It does include several things I won’t bother posting here. The COVID-19 pandemic has shown us (in spades) how rotten certain human beings can be. And these folks are up there at the top of the list.