Scammed!
Sucking In Seniors
Some years ago, when I was a financial advisor with a global insurance firm, we were told in no uncertain terms that we needed to pursue baby boomers as clients.
Why? Because they had all the wealth and we – the insurance advisors – had to get it before the greedy banks got it.
Now, we’re talking not millions or billions but trillions in financial assets like pension money, large severances, bulging retirement accounts (at banks), etc.
All this money would be left to the children of the boomers. So, if we could collar the boomers as clients while they were alive, the odds were good that we could land their kids as clients, too after their parents shuffled off the mortal coil.
With that kind of money washing around, it’s not hard to imagine that the baby boomers, retired for a couple of years and now bona fide “seniors” would attract the attention of another group of individuals: tech-savvy scammers.
A recent story in the New York Times underscores the point in spades: a 76 year old lawyer is cleverly scammed out of his retirement savings.
It’s an all too familiar story of scammers targeting seniors but when it happens to a sharp (I presume) lawyer, you have to consider how deviously smart the scammers are.
What happened to Barry Heitin, the lawyer, could have happened to any of us. He was completely fooled by the sophisticated storyline that was woven to convince him to release his financial assets into the hands of the villains, a methodical process that unfolded over a number of weeks.
“People over 60, often targeted by cybercriminals because they are viewed as having the largest piles of savings, experienced the steepest losses among all age groups in 2023, at more than $3.4 billion, according to the F.B.I.” New York Times, July 29, 2024
When the fraud was finally uncovered, Barry Heitin learned that at least seven other Americans had been hit by the same scammers, based in India.
This is interesting because India has long been the home country for internet scammers for several decades.
Why India? Well, there are a number of reasons but it probably boils down to the fact that the population is highly educated and digitally motivated. India has embraced digital technology rapidly and with a rapacious appetite to compete and get ahead.
For every honest, brilliant Indian programmer or software engineer, there are ten times that number who are dishonest and looking for easy and fast money. And technology is the road to riches for them.
India is also home to thousands of call centers usually servicing corporate clients in the West. They are cheap to set up, staffed with well educated individuals willing to work hard. However, the call center technology is also abundantly available to the scammers.
10 years ago, I rarely received a text message from someone I didn’t know – unless that person sent it in error. These days, I get at least one and sometimes two a day. They include:
· Unpaid (and fictitious) parking tickets
· “Final Notice” tax bills
· Urgent notifications from fake courier companies (my fave is IPS which uses a logo that is the spitting image of the UPS logo) saying they can’t deliver a parcel without me updating my address and phone number via a link they include in the text
The list goes on. Many of the scams are based on a phone call with a recorded message threatening a lawsuit over some made-up issue unless money is wired immediately.
The number, variety and sophistication increase each week and God knows what role AI is playing in all of it.
One way that the “good guys” are fighting back is on YouTube, believe it or not. Scammer Payback is a YouTube channel run by a pretty bright dude with a ton of tech savvy who actually hacks the hackers in India and records the entire interaction, right down to tracing their physical location in India. The videos are eye-popping and hilarious, a kind of Candid Camera (if you’re over 60, you’ll get the reference!) of revenge.
There is so much of it that law enforcement simply can’t keep up; they’re overwhelmed and can only offer advice on how to spot a scam before getting sucked into it.
So, therein lies the lesson: don’t be a gullible “senior”. I suggest that if you receive an email, text message or phone call that doesn’t feel right, question the hell out of it. If it quacks like a duck and walks like a duck…