In the Scam of the day for March 6, 2025 I told you that  twenty-five Canadians were arrested and charged with operating the grandparent scam through a call center in Canada where they contacted elderly victims in 40 American states between 2021 and 2024 during which time they stole $21 million from their victims.  The scammers posed as either the targeted victims’ grandchild or an attorney representing the grandchild asking for money to be paid for bail.  The scammers sent couriers posing as bail bondsmen to collect the cash and told the elderly victims that there was a gag order that prevented the victims from discussing the phony charges.

However, one of the prime suspects, Jimmy Ylimaki had managed to avoid capture back in 2025, but he has now been arrested in Nicaragua and extradited to Vermont where he was arraigned and entered a plea of not guilty

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 fifteen years, it continues to victimize people.

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.

Due to AI voice cloning the scam has gotten worse with unsophisticated scammers able to use voice cloning technology to disguise their voices to sound like that of the grandchild.  The scammers are able to obtain audio of the grandchild they are impersonating through social media posts to use to clone their voice.

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