When he was a teenager, Justin Ray White traveled the country with his father as part of a nationwide band of con artists. Now an inmate in an Idaho state prison, White recalls how his father would have him roll down the car window to listen while he talked to elderly people so the boy could “pick up pointers about how to hustle them.”

The scam involved phony door-to-door home repairs, such as roofing, painting, asphalt paving, and termite spraying. White’s advice after his life of crime: “Never hire anyone to do work for you [who] shows up on your doorstep. They are there to steal your money.” Other red flags, says White, are contractors whose pickup trucks have no license plates; who offer a discount because they have “leftover materials from another job”; or who insist on being paid in cash.

A preventive measure, says White, is to scatter a few toys in your front yard, “so it doesn’t look like old people live there ... just a couple of these is enough to throw a [scam artist] off.”

Behind closed doors

Not all crooks come through the front door—they also come through your telephone and computer. According to the Social Security Administration, telemarketing fraud is big business and seniors are special targets. Scams offered include prize offers, travel packages, vitamins and health products, investments, and charities.
 
The solution? Simply say, “Take me off your call list,” and hang up. But don’t rely on the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC’s) national “do-not-call” list to protect you from con artists. “Some are simply ignoring it and counting on the fact that they’ll be gone before the FTC can respond,” cautions James Walsh, author of You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man (Silver Lake Publishing, 2002).

This past year the IRS issued a warning to families of military servicemembers. A telephone caller posing as an IRS employee would call a family member and tell him that he is entitled to a $4,000 tax refund because his relative is in the military. All that is necessary for processing the check, says the caller, is a credit card number to cover the $42 postage and handling fee. By the time the scam is discovered, the scammer has racked up major purchases on the victim’s credit card.
 
Crooks also will try to steal an elderly person’s money through e-mail. One of the most popular e-mail con games is the “Nigerian scam.” The letter looks innocent enough, supposedly coming from a Nigerian lawyer (or banker or pastor) who enlists the e-mail recipient’s help in getting millions of dollars out of the country. It asks for private information, like phone numbers and bank account numbers, purportedly to help keep the money “safe” in the United States. In exchange, the money’s “host” will get a hefty percentage of the cash. According to Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho)—who has received such an e-mail himself—two years ago a Boise, Idaho, man who lost $11,000 in this scam went to Nigeria, where he was kidnapped and had to pay $3,000 to be set free. Another man, not so fortunate, was murdered in Nigeria as a result of a similar scam.

Peril on the streets

James Quiggle, director of communications for the Coalition Against Insurance Fraud, says criminals look for elderly motorists to involve in staged accidents. “As the fraud artists see it, seniors drive slower, they’re less alert to setups on the road,” says Quiggle.
Quiggle advises three tactics:

1. Stay on the lookout for an older car that seems to be shadowing you.

Crime among friends

Walsh emphasizes that senior citizens, who often live alone and have money available, are particularly vulnerable to financial scams. According to Walsh, crooks customize their pitches to fears about current events.

“In the wake of the Enron and Tyco corporate accounting scandals, I noticed a number of investment seminars ... that promised to show how to take advantage of the Wall Street turmoil and ‘reap big profits,’” says Walsh, who says scammers use financial planning seminars to recruit victims. “I suspect some of these seminars were crooked.”

Walsh’s advice: “In general, stay away from any investment that guarantees big risk-free profits—25 percent per year is often the starting point, and the promises go up from there. There are big profits to be made in a capitalist economy—but bigger profits always mean bigger risk and no guarantees.”
Con artists use negative feelings to make their scams against senior citizens work, but they play off positive, healthy emotions, too—like friendship, loyalty, and patriotism.

Walsh says these investment-scheme “perps” are good at insinuating themselves into groups where trust is assumed. “Retirees should be wary of mixing business with pleasure,” cautions Walsh. “A good response to any offers of big profits is, ‘No thanks, my money is all committed to an investment plan I set up several years ago.’ ” Walsh says scam artists usually will move on when they get a firm response like that.

Frank Abagnale, the con-artist-turned-crime-consultant whose life was portrayed in the movie Catch Me if You Can, cites a prevalent and effective scam that has been used for 40 years—one that requires no technology, just a helpful, civic-minded senior citizen.

Abagnale describes the setup: “Two men sit outside a savings bank looking for an elderly woman departing the bank. They follow her home, ring the bell, and identify themselves as FBI agents. They say they are investigating [her] bank ... because they believe one of the tellers is embezzling money. The government is asking for her help in catching this embezzler.

“They instruct her to return to the bank and withdraw all of her money in cash and return home. The imposters say they are going to ... take the money back to their office to have the money marked. Then they will return all of the cash to her to redeposit into her account so they can catch the embezzler. She will be doing her country and the bank a great service but cannot confide in anyone at the bank, as they are not sure who the embezzler is. Of course, they never return.”