Patsy Froehlich was alarmed when a PayPal email confirmed her purchase of bitcoin.
“What in the world?” she thought. “I don’t have a PayPal account and I have only the foggiest idea of what bitcoin is.” Thus began a whole day of trying to straighten out the purchase. Luckily, the fine print on the email gave her the customer service number.
“I called, and the pleasant-sounding representative apologized for the mix-up and assured me they would arrange for a prompt refund, by forwarding the money to my bank account,” she said.
Following his prompts, she downloaded a cellphone app that enabled the man to see her computer screen, and pull up her bank account. He asked her to type in the $200 refund she was owed on the computer’s keypad.
She was horrified to find that she’d typed in $20,000, and it turned out, the mistake (she thought it was hers) couldn’t be changed. The representative was horrified. He couldn’t change it, either, and worried he would be fired.
“He’d just gotten married and needed this job!” Froehlich said. “They had a new baby girl!” She was distraught that she might cost this poor man his job, even saying a short prayer for him, his wife, and his baby. He had a solution: she could return the $20,000 by withdrawing the amount and transferring it back to the PayPal account. She struggled to do as he said, but her computer was slow, and she was unfamiliar with online banking, so the app, which worked only in 15-minute spurts, kept timing out.
“The guy finally asked if I had a local bank I could go to—to return the funds via a physical wire ‘before my boss finds out’,” Froehlich said. After a long ordeal at the bank, she thought she’d accomplished the transfer, only to hear later from the bank that they found it suspicious and it didn’t go through. Her bank spent many hours with her trying to undo the damage that might have occurred from misuse of all the personal information the scammer had gathered.
Gazette columnist Tony Townsend wrote in depth about this kind of scam last month.
Common to most scams is a sense of urgency, the pressure of something that has to be done right away, or your credit will be ruined, someone will be fired, your loved one will suffer, or (this is very common) you’ll miss out on an amazing deal, Dr. Laurie Archbald-Pannone said. She’s a professor of geriatric medicine at U.Va., and the medical director of U.Va’s Geriatrics Outpatient Clinic at the Jefferson Area Board for Aging. She foresees the problem becoming worse, with the growing capability of scammers not only to gain control of personal computers, and duplicate familiar voices, but to also doctor images through artificial intelligence.
Other schemes are low-tech but equally insidious. Andrew Taylor was skeptical but hopeful when someone from Publisher’s Clearinghouse called him last month with the news he’d won $5.1 million. He wondered: Where were the balloons and the camera crew? According to his caller, they were waiting with the Clearinghouse staff at a Staunton motel for Taylor to purchase the $500 worth of gift cards at Walmart that would fulfill the legal requirements for the cash award. As soon as he purchased them, they’d show up at his door to exchange the giant check for the gift cards.
Instead of rushing out to Walmart, Taylor called the police. They told him the scammers would never come to his door, and the promised exchange would never happen. Instead, they’d ask him to read the numbers on the cards over the phone, then disappear forever.
Sure enough, they continued to call and text until Taylor’s lack of response put an end to the plan.
“If something sounds too good to be true, it probably isn’t true,” said Dr. Archbald-Pannone. In her work with the elderly, she’s also seen plenty of what she calls “romance scams,” she said, where someone the victim has met online establishes a relationship and promises love and devotion. When it comes time to meet in person, the scammer needs an enormous amount of money in order to travel.
Doris Gelbman, a specialist in elder law, said the romance scammers may start with a small sum of money, but then need more. “All of a sudden they need $10,000 to rent a helicopter to get off their remote island,” she said. “Once you’re a victim, you might be victimized over and over again, with increased financial demands. You become a money mill.” And often, once the victims become suspicious, they’re too embarrassed to tell relatives or friends, let alone to report it to the police.
Besides the romantic angle, scammers rely on other ways to pull on your heartstrings. George Coupar dealt with a scheme executed with amazing precision and planning, obviously the work of professional criminals. A caller identifying himself as their son reached the Coupars from an unfamiliar number. That’s because, he said, his phone was confiscated. He was in jail after being involved in an accident. He had a broken nose, and couldn’t talk, but he did have the number of an attorney for his parents to call, a public defender who could arrange bond for $7,000. There were a couple of obstacles: the son was in a Leesburg jail, it was 2 on a Friday afternoon, and if they couldn’t get the cash to a Loudoun County bank by 4, he’d be in jail for the weekend with a broken nose.
The public defender’s name was accurate, but the number they were given was different from the published one. That’s because, a secretary who answered said, he was leaving for the weekend, but wanted to take their call on his private line. The panicked parents were grateful for his apparent interest. They heard he truly believed in their son’s innocence and had found some traffic camera footage that would prove it, footage that wouldn’t be available until Monday. He blasted the judge for being unreasonable about the cash bail and the weekend imprisonment, but he was there to help. Another call to his private office phone, again answered by his secretary, confirmed that the window for bail would close at 4.
They knew they couldn’t get the cash so quickly, let alone get it the 100 miles to Leesburg, so they began to call friends who lived nearer to the bank named for the transaction. In their frantic search, someone referred them to a different Leesburg attorney. He had a simple recommendation. “Call your son,” he said. Well, George Coupar said, we can’t. He doesn’t have a phone and, even if he did, he’s unable to talk. “Just call your son,” the attorney repeated. When they did, they reached him right away. “What’s up?” he answered, ending their nightmare. The Coupars speculate that the scammers might have stationed a fake employee inside the bank, ready to greet them and take the cash.
It’s common for scammers like the one Froehlich encountered actually to direct their victims to make withdrawals from their bank accounts, for a luxury item, to help a relative, or to “help straighten out a financial error,” but don’t want them to let the bankers know why. To make sure of compliance, they often ask the victims to stay on the line while they drive to the bank and withdraw the money.
Mallory Corcoran, the assistant manager of Crozet’s branch of the U.Va. Credit Union, confirmed that these cases are definitely on the upswing, that some of the victims are on the phone when they come in, and that bank employees frequently identify fraudulent exchanges and block them. “We have a department that lets us know what new scams are popping up,” she said. “But we’re also told to trust our gut about what just doesn’t sound right.” After a while, she said, most bankers can spot even the subtlest of nefarious schemes.
Gelbman said that by the time people who’ve been defrauded come to her, it’s too late. Not all scams are elaborate, she said. Sometimes the odd dog-walker or service provider senses that someone is a caring person who is not at all suspicious and keeps asking for more and more money to handle the family emergencies that keep cropping up. And, when it happens to older people, it’s often their family members who consult with her. “Sometimes, I disagree with their solution,” she said. “They want to control their parents’ money, or forbid them to write checks.” That’s not the right approach, she said. In these cases, it’s her experience that the older persons may retreat further into isolation, become alienated from their families, and are even more susceptible to bad actors.
“These people aren’t stupid,” she said. “I have had college professors scammed out of huge amounts of money, over a long time.” The solution is not to blame and marginalize the victims. “It’s not their fault,” she said. “The fault lies with the justice system, with the courts and the prosecutors.”
Because these cases are hard to prosecute, they tend to be dropped or ignored. “We need to do better for our vulnerable people,” she said. “We need to step up.”
Keep Your Money Safe
The FBI reports that scammers stole more than $94 million from Virginia residents older than 60 in 2023, about $34 million more than in 2022, when $60 million was stolen from Virginia’s elders. Virginia is now in the top 10 states recording the highest losses. California and Florida are the top two.
Publications by the AARP acknowledge that every person of every age is targeted by fraudsters, but older Americans who either earn more or have a lifetime of assets saved up tend to lose more money.
The FBI recommends the following tips to protect yourself:
- Do not answer telephone calls from telephone numbers you do not recognize.
- If you receive an unsolicited or suspicious call from someone claiming to be a family member and urgently requesting money, hang up. Verify the story with your family member by calling them directly. If you cannot reach them, call someone else in your family, even if scammers told you to keep it secret.
- Limit the personally identifiable information you post on social media and dating websites. Scammers may use this information to create a convincing story.
- If an unknown individual contacts you online or by telephone, do not release financial or personally identifiable information and do not send money.
- Find out more, including how to report fraud to the FBI at www.fbi.gov/how-we-can-help-you/scams-and-safety.
