Earlier this week sixteen people who were part of a criminal group operating the infamous grandparent scam from the Dominican Republic were indicted on charges related to perpetrating the grandparent scam on hundreds of elderly people in New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. I am sure by now all of you are familiar with the grandparent scam where a grandparent receives a telephone call from someone purporting to be their grandchild who has gotten into some trouble, most commonly a traffic accident, legal trouble or medical problems in a far away place. The caller pleads for the grandparent to send money immediately to help resolve the problem. However the caller also begs the grandparent not to tell mom and dad. One would think that no one would be gullible enough to fall for this scam, but don’t be so hard on the victims of this scam. Scam artists have a knowledge of psychology of which Freud would have been envious and are able to use that knowledge to persuade their victims to send money right away. While this scam has been going on for approximately fourteen years, it continues to victimize people.
According to the indictment, along with the usual form of the scam where scammers posing as the grandchild call the targeted victim and plead for money due to an emergency such as a car accident, the scammers in this particular group would also initiate contact with the targeted victims by first calling as a third party informing them of the phony emergency, generally a car accident in which the targeted victims were told the grandchild was involved. Then the targeted victims would receive another call purportedly from a lawyer representing the grandchild asking for money needed to represent the grandchild due to criminal charges being brought related to the phony accident. The scammers would then often send accomplices, called money mules, to the homes of the grandparents to pick up the money which would be sent back to the scammers in the Dominican Republic. This particular criminal organization is alleged to have perpetrated this scam for more than five years in which they scammed their victims out of millions of dollars.
TIPS
Scammers often use the nicknames of the grandchildren when speaking to their intended victims. Sometimes they get this information from social media while in other instances they get this information from reading obituaries which may contain the names of grandchildren so merely because the correct name is used in the call is no reason to believe the call. Don’t respond immediately to such a call without calling the real grandchild on his or her cell phone or call the parents and confirm the whereabouts of the grandchild. If a medical problem is the ruse used, you can call the real hospital. If legal problems are the hook you can call the real police. You can also test the caller with a question that could be answered only by the real grandchild, but make sure that it really is a question that only the real grandchild could answer and not just anyone who might read the real grandchild’ s social media postings. Prudent families can also come up with a code word to use in an emergency which a scammer will never know.
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