Safe Banking for Seniors
Criminals are ever becoming more clever and aggressive in their efforts to defraud our clients, especially our elderly clients. The bad guys are skilled at hacking into people’s email accounts, impersonating them, and then asking their bank and/or investment firms to send money from their accounts to accounts controlled by the bad guys. Episodes of such email hacking/impersonations create work for the deposit operations folks at every bank on almost a daily basis.
Likewise, criminals have a variety of schemes whereby they will call people on the phone, impersonating someone else, with the purpose of inspiring unsuspecting victims to send them money. Most of these phone schemes tend to prey upon the elderly, who are the most likely to still have landlines and/or are more prone to answer a call from an unfamiliar phone number. The criminals on the other end of the phone line will impersonate an IRS agent, a member of law enforcement, a lawyer, or a family member in distress. At the bottom of this article are links to some useful websites with more detailed information about how to avoid scams and what to do if you think you have been scammed.
The best defense for anyone for avoiding scams is to never talk to any stranger about money.
We strongly recommend that our clients never answer any call from a phone number you don’t recognize. If the call is important, the caller will leave a message. If the message is from a stranger, we recommend you not return it. Same with emails. If the petitioner seems legitimate, we recommend you contact us to help you discern the validity of the caller’s request. We help clients every day with situations like this, and we take great pride in helping our clients avoid being robbed by the bad guys.
