Next to pharmaceutical ads, you can’t escape ads aimed at older Americans.
Whether it’s about healthcare, home maintenance, or life insurance, seniors are targeted by many organizations. However, not all these products and services are on the level.
Because of their trusting nature, lack of experience with technology or distance from family members, seniors can be especially vulnerable to scams.
Coming up on All Sides, we’re speaking with an attorney and consumer advocate about how seniors can protect themselves from scams.
But no matter your age, no one is immune to scams. Find out how to protect yourself too.
Guests:
Transcript
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Amy Juravich: Welcome to All Sides with Amy Juravich. The Federal Trade Commission, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Federal Bureau of Investigations. Annually, they each release reports revealing how Americans lose billions of dollars to consumer fraud and scams. New FBI data shows that Americans over the age of 60 lost $7.7 billion to scams last year.
In Ohio alone, that number was around $163 million. Some of the most vulnerable consumers falling victim to these scams are senior citizens. We’re speaking now about how seniors can protect themselves from fraud and scams this hour. But no matter your age, no one is immune to scams. As we learn to protect seniors, we’ll learn to project ourselves too.
Our guests this hour are Creola Johnson, President’s Club Professor of Law at Ohio State University’s Moritz College of Law. Welcome to the show, Professor Johnson. Thank you. And Kenyetta Bagby, Office of Consumer Affairs Manager and the Director of Community Outreach at the Ohio Department of Commerce. Welcome to All Sides Kenyetta.
Kenyetta Bagby: Great to be here.
Amy Juravich: So Kenyetta, I wanted to start with you. Are more people reporting incidents of seniors being scammed? Do you feel like it’s happening more frequently or is it always happening?
Bagby: It is more frequent, I have to say. If you think about the numbers that, even the numbers you called out, 200,000 people nationwide, 200,00 Americans reported to the FBI that they were scammed. 60% of those were seniors, 60 years old and older.
If you’d think about that in terms of the loss, $12.8 billion alone last year was lost in scams and fraud. More than $7 billion of that was senior, $7.7 billion was senior. So it is happening more frequently and the dollars continue to increase.
Juravich: What’s reported though. Because like can we assume more people are scammed and they just don’t tell the FBI?
Bagby: FBI or you. Absolutely. They’re embarrassed. So, of course, they’re not going to report it. Yeah. Yeah.
Juravich: Well, Cree, there’s a story from a couple of years ago that made national news that I wanted to start with, with you, and it’s related to a senior being scammed and it ended in a tragedy. Can you tell us about Lolita Hall, a Columbus resident, an Uber driver? How did a scam change her life?
Creola Johnson: Unfortunately, she ended up dead. Now we have to go back in time. A gentleman named William Brock received a phone call from someone claiming to be his grandson. He said it sounded like his grandson, the grandson was in trouble and needed money to be sent in order to bail him out of jail. And so he initially was convinced it was grandson, but he was smart enough to ask a few questions. And the person on the other end could not answer the question.
They switched to other people involved in the scam, and they still couldn’t answer specific questions about the grandson. So Mr. Brock decided it was a scam. So he said, I’m not going to give you anything. Then the scammers ratched up the threat and basically said, if you don’t pay us, we’re going to kill you. And told him that someone was coming to the house to get money from him, thousands of dollars. And that he had to pay them or they would kill him.
So Lolita Hall, who was a Uber driver here in Columbus for over 10 years, she was contacted through the Uber app and basically paid to go and pick up a package. She went to pick up the package and immediately encountered Mr. Brock, who was holding a gun towards her, pointed towards her. He assumed she was in on a scam. She immediately tried to run from him. And as she tried to get away, he shot her. He ultimately shot her multiple times, and she died.
He initially said that she had threatened him, but because she was an Uber driver and had a camera in the automobile, actually live recording, they could see that she actually posed no threat to him. So unfortunately, he was a victim of a grandparent scam, that is to say an emergency scam, where someone is impersonating your grandchild or a loved one. And claiming to need money. Unfortunately, he jumped to the conclusion that the Uber driver was in on the scam. But she was being scammed as well. But she being scamed as well, and she wound up dead.
And Mr. Brock was charged with multiple crimes and convicted of those back in January, and he was sentenced to 20 years. He’s 83 years old, and so at his age, a 20-year sentence, he might, is likely to pass away while incarcerated. And so it’s a ultimate story of a tragedy. A scam that resulted in a tragic outcome for two different people.
Juravich: And Kenyetta, when you hear a story like that, when you hear about a story that makes national news, I mean, it’s tragic, but also, were you surprised? I mean it’s truly an extreme case, but did it surprise you that two people ended up being scammed and it ended up being such a tragedy?
Bagby: Unfortunately, it’s not surprising. Because of the level that the fraudsters will go to, it’s now surprising. There are so many frauds and scams being perpetrated on our seniors and just everyone that unfortunately, that’s not something that surprises me.
Juravich: Yeah, Professor Johnson, whatever.
Speaker 5: Happened to the scammers in that case, were they found? So the scammers were not caught.
Johnson: But this allows me to transition to the modern-day scams are not a single person on a cell phone. Modern-day scam, including scams targeted towards the elderly, have multiple participants. And so just recently, last year, there was a Canadian-based scam involving over 30 different individuals who were indicted by the federal government, the United States government for defrauding consumers. Through the grandparent scam out of millions of dollars, tens of millions dollars, and they all had a part.
It starts with the targeting, right? The modern day scam starts with targeting. But the targeting may be, is usually based on robocalls and other technology where you are sending millions of text messages to people. And then you move into the phase if the person responds. Then you either tap into trust that’s already there or you try to build trust.
In the grandparent scam case, they’re trying to tap into a trust that already exists. The grandparent trusts the grandchild, so all the scammer has to do is to impersonate the grand child. And then the modern day scam allows that to happen, to convince, because Mr. Brock said he was at first convinced. And if we look at the news reports on AI technology, the technology has evolved so that it’s very difficult to tell the real from the fake.
Usually there’s a study that recently came out showing that the majority of people, if the technology is top-notch, cannot tell the difference between the scam and the fake, in other words, a deep fake video or a recording of your voice. Voice cloning technology only needs a few seconds. So for example, if we go back to the William Brock situation, if William Brock’s grandson had social media accounts. Where he’s just made a video of himself. The technology only needs a few seconds of him speaking and then be able to turn that into a whole conversation perpetrated over the phone to convince Mr. Brock that the grandson was in trouble and needed money.
Juravich: Wow. And so Kenyetta, the AI is so good that they can impersonate someone’s grandchild. I’ve heard talk about families needing to have like a secret word or asking, so I guess Mr. Brock asked some questions, you know, maybe like things that the AI bot or these scammers wouldn’t you know like you know, what’s your mother’s maiden name or, or like, or what present did I get you for Christmas last year? You know, so Kenyatta, what is, what the, is it good to have a codeword or is it to ask questions like that? Like what, what did I give you for Christmas last year.
Bagby: Both of those are great. With my family members, we have a code phrase. And that phrase should not be anything that you have listed on your Facebook page or any interaction that you have listed with your family or friends on Facebook or social media.
Juravich: You’re not gonna say it on the radio here, I’m sure. No, absolutely not. Can you give me, no. No, absolutely not. No, can you give me an example though, like a quote, like…
Bagby: So one could be “Jenny from the Block.” You know, when they talk about, I can’t remember her name now, Jennifer. Jennifer Lopez. Jennifer Lopez, yeah. They call her “Jenny from The Block.” So if there’s something that your family has together that you share, something inside joke that you shared, that could be it. Or something that you would, only the family member would know, like she said about the gift that you got for Christmas or something that you got for your birthday. It should be something that’s personal that no one else would know except you and the person.
Juravich: Johnson, what’s your opinion on the code word versus the code phrase?
Johnson: I believe you need a code phrase, and you need to actually practice. Right? So when you get together for the next, so 4th of July is coming up. This is the perfect time you’re interacting with your relatives and you say, okay, let’s now establish what the code phrase is. And someone calls up in person and says, I’m so and so I’m going to ask what’s the codephrase. If that person doesn’t know the code phase, then I’m going to hang up, and I’m going to take that number. Go to FTC website and report that as a scam.
Juravich: This is All Sides on 89.7 NPR News. We’re talking about how seniors can protect themselves from scams and we’re talking with Creola Johnson at an Ohio State University law professor and Kenyetta Bagby, community outreach director for the Ohio Department of Commerce.
Cree, you sent a note saying that you wanted to add that also the FBI reports, these agency reports I was talking about, the numbers that Kenyatta said earlier, those reports are made for regulators, policymakers, law enforcement. Those reports say the method of the scam, but you say that that’s not what’s really the important thing. The important thing is that you want people to know the anatomy of a scam, not that the report doesn’t matter to you.
Johnson: Well, the report matters for purposes of the regulators and law enforcement and policymakers, but for the average consumer, so let me give you an example. If you look at the IC3 report from 2025, this is the report, Internet crimes put out by the FBI. Okay. And that report lumps romance and confidence scams together. Okay, so- I understand what a romance scam is, what’s the other- Confidence, so with the FBI, that would include the grandparent scam, where somebody has gained your confidence.
And the FBI lumps those all together. So I could not tell you, for example, from this report, how many people in Ohio fail for a grandparent scam because it’s not separated single. It’s not its own category. Instead, they lump multiple scams together and they focus instead on the method by which you were contacted, right? So were you contacted by cell phone, text message, online email, et cetera. And instead… They also talk about impersonation.
Well, if you think about scams 99 percent of scams involve impersonation in other words The scammer is not going to in person reveal his or her own identity So knowing that there was impersonation involved literally means nothing to the consumer in terms of how to protect yourself instead You focus on What is the person saying what when they speak with you? So it’s target targeting along with the relationship. They are trying to exploit. So with the grandparent scam, you’re trying to explore that relationship between the grand parent and the grandchild, right?
In a romance scam, you don’t already have an existing relationship. So, but the scammer is saying things based on looking at your social media to target you to be the person that they think you want to be based on what you’ve put on your social-media posts. And so you’re looking at not how did they contact you, But instead… What are they saying? Are they saying things that sounds like the perfect person that you have already put on social media? Well, then you should be seeing that as a red flag.
Juravich: Kenyetta, some of this seems like it’s not just like a quick 10-minute phone call. I mean, some these scams seem like they’re very invested in their developing relationships. Tell me more about that.
Bagby: Are invested. They know that they can’t, they may not be able to get you after five or ten minutes, but if they take the time to get to know you and find out your likes and dislikes, what you are looking for, what you’re shopping for when you put information on social media, all of that information becomes a part of the puzzle that they use to finally get you to provide them with your financial data or your personal data. They want to get enough information from you that they can build on and get what they want from you, which is ultimately your money.
Juravich: Have scammers ever impersonated, because you work for the Ohio Department of Commerce, do they impersonate government agencies too?
Bagby: Absolutely. What’s that look like? Government agencies, they can say that they’re from the attorney general’s office. They can say there’s actually a scam that went out from the Attorney General’s office some time ago last year. There was an email that went, a text message that went from the Attorney General office and they immediately turned around and put out a report that they did not send out an email or a text message from the attorney general’s office. Asking anyone to call in or give any money for anything.
Also, not only that, but these scammers can come to you telling you they’re from Medicare or Medicaid or any of these institutions. And so it’s very important that you become aware of the different scams that are out there because by not knowing you put yourself at greater risk.
Juravich: But Cree the idea that a government agency is scamming you or you get a text message from the AG’s office Then you can’t use a code phrase or have a special family code because that’s not gonna help
Johnson: That’s exactly right.
Juravich: So what do you do then? Alright.
Johnson: All right, so let’s go back in time for your listening audience. If you were alive in 1980, what happened when someone knocked on the door?
Juravich: You answered the door
Johnson: Well, I grew up in New Orleans, you didn’t answer the door.
Juravich: So yeah, I grew up in a suburb. So, so.
Johnson: So, you had the kid, me, peek around through the curtain to see who was at the door, and if you didn’t recognize the person, you didn t open the door and then later we got the peephole. Well, and then if you looked through it and you didn s recognize the people, you didn t opened the door. Unfortunately though, technology made us trust caller ID. But the scammers, modern scams, rely on spoofing technology.
That is to say, this is technology. That makes your caller ID display the number, for example, of the attorney general or the Federal Trade Commission or any other trusted institution such as your bank. And so you literally cannot trust what’s on the caller ID. All right, so here’s my catchphrase. Stop, don’t reply, go verify. Stop, Don’t reply. Go verify.
So when you see a phone call, stop, do not pick it up. Let it go to voicemail. And then if they claim they’re from the FTC or the attorney general, don’t use the phone number given in the message. You go and look up the number for yourself and contact that number. And so, but there are a lot of institutions such as the Federal Trade Commission, the eternal general, you’re not gonna get personal phone calls from big government institutions telling you, your account has been hacked or you fail to show up for jury duty. Or that’s not how they contact you. They will contact you through mail.
That is the preferred method and the normal method. But if you’re getting a call out of the blue and your call ID shows that it’s from some institution, I’m telling you, stop trusting the call ID. Let it go to voicemail and then listen. If it sounds like it’s some company that you’ve heard of, you find the number on your own. So for example, if it says it’s from your bank. Don’t respond.
Use the number and the message, pick up your last bank statement or go online into your bank account and get a phone number so that you can, and in fact, while we’re giving out tips, I wanna tell you to take the trusted institutions and print out their names and numbers and have them on your wall. Remember a long time ago, they told you to have an exit plan, if there’s a fire, how are you gonna get out of the house? Well, I’m saying to you, you need a list of trusted institutions and the correct phone number. So you know what number to call in the event that you get called about some emergency or some problem.
Juravich: Our guests this hour are Cruella Johnson, Ohio State Law Professor, and Kenyetta Bagby, Community Outreach Director for the Ohio Department of Commerce, and we are talking about how to protect seniors and ourselves from scams. Coming up we’ll get some more tips and we’ll hear about more scams, that’s when All Sides continues on 89.7 NPR News.
You’re listening to All Sides. I’m your host, Amy Juravich. Globally, there are an estimated 174 scam attempts every second. That’s according to a survey conducted by Jen. That’s the company behind the cybersecurity company, Norton. That’s 174 scams attempts every second, think about that for a minute. And these come in the form of tech support impersonators, distress calls from family members using AI. Phishing emails, fraudulent links in text messages, even bogus ads on Facebook.
We’re talking about how seniors can protect themselves from these scams this hour, but no matter your age, no one is immune to scams. So we’re talking about how we can all protect ourselves as well. Still with us is Professor Creola Johnson, law professor at Ohio State’s University’s Moritz College of Law. She researches and publishes about consumer finance issues, predatory lending and common scams, thank you for being here, Professor Johnson. Thank you. And also still with us is Kenyetta Bagby, community outreach director with the Ohio Department of Commerce. Her department regularly issues warnings about scams impacting Ohioans trying to steal money or personal information. Thanks for joining us today, Kenyatta. My pleasure. So despite its well intentions and efforts, we used to have this national do not call list that gave consumers a choice about whether they wanted to receive telemarketing calls. It was certainly not foolproof. Has a better way been developed to block these spam calls or texts or are we just going to keep getting them every day forever and ever? You chuckle.
Johnson: The short answer is we’re going to get these calls. We can get less of them. I haven’t paid for any of the paid apps, but I’ve been told some of the paid apps really reduce how many robo calls you get to your cell phone.
Juravich: Like getting an app to help you, is that what you mean?
Johnson: Right, download an app on your cell phone, for example, but the thing that I do is I just have on my cell phone which is an Apple, I silence any phone call from a number not saved in my phone.
Juravich: Mmm.
Johnson: And so I won’t even get the call. So there are different ways to do it without paying for it, but they’re still going to slip through. So for example, with the text message, you can still get a text message because the companies that are out there, they’re buying huge amounts of data. You think about what’s out there. I learned this for the first time in 2008 when I was teaching a consumer law course. I had a student who used to work for a data mining company and she did her paper on data mining. Explaining how these companies get an enormous amount of data, and with AI now, you combine it with all of the technology we already have, they’re able to package it all together so that they know that you, Amy, live here, here’s a phone number associated with you, here’s an email address associated with your, here are all these other facts about your life.
And so, when you think about them using those lists, like for example, I hardly ever give my personal cell phone number to anyone. And yet, every election cycle I’m getting text messages from people telling me to vote for someone.
Juravich: Find you somehow.
Johnson: They find me somehow. And I think those lists have been purchased because every once in a while I’m getting a text message offering me a job, telling me I’m hired, or something like that. And so you wanna get into the habit of not trusting the name. Yeah.
Juravich: And Kenyatta, you work for the Ohio Department of Commerce. I mean, is there anything the state government, the federal government, is there any thing the government can do to protect us from these lists being bought and sold and bought and sold and our number going everywhere?
Bagby: Well, there are a couple of things that we are doing. This is one of them, making our presence known, letting people know about the scams and fraud. The information is not just bought, it’s also stolen. If you think about the data breaches that take place on a regular basis, so what we have to do is keep the community informed about everything that’s going on in terms scams and frauds, what we’re seeing and what we are doing to protect the community.
Juravich: I mean, I am being told at least once a day that my password was found on some scam site and it’s telling me to change it. I can’t change my password every day. Can either of you give us some password advice whenever you’re constantly being told that your password is corrupted?
Bagby: One of the things that I have started doing is, again, using phrases rather than just one word or a couple of words. And when I use that phrase, I also use special characters. I use caps and lower cases, making sure that the password is indeed strong. There are also tools that you can use on your phone that will help you create strong passwords. I don’t use those because I need to be able to remember my password, but using a phrase rather than just a single word or a single phrase is a single-word is better than just having that single word there. So what you’re going to want to do is not only use a phrase, but also use facial recognition or facial identity or the thumbprint or have a passcode. Number that is also associated with that.
Juravich: Do I need to be changing my password every time it tells me it’s found on a scam site? No. No.
Johnson: If you have a phrase, AI cannot, and I mean like a long phrase, they’re telling you to have a long phase, a phrase of things that don’t go together. Peanut butter, pickles, and chips on the beach. I mean, nobody talks like that. But if you have long phrase like that and you’re getting an email saying, your email has been hacked, it’s a scam. Because AI could not, in any universe, put together nonsensical words that you have as a long phrase as your password phrase.
So not a password, not, when I first started at Ohio State, you needed eight digits, where you had four letters, four numbers, and now they tell you to do a phrase. And the phrase, as she said, needs to have characters, but I’m saying the phrase also needs to be nonsensical to anybody else, because AI won’t be able to guess what is your phrase. It can’t be, I love my husband. Yeah
Juravich: Alright, I wanted to talk about some more scams and Cree, you wanted to mention something that I had not heard about, but then when I Googled it, I was like, oh my gosh, the Tom Selleck scam. Tell me about this. I had not heard about this, but wow.
Johnson: Okay, so the category are romance scams, and there are different types of romance scames. So the majority of people who are being scammed through romance, they’re just ordinary folks. They’re impersonating. The scammers are still impersonating ordinary folks, but lately in the last few years, scammers have been impersonating celebrities. Why? Because the voice cloning technology and the deep fake video technology allows you to put together an image of someone who looks like they’re talking to you in real time and because these celebrities have been in movies and so forth, you have their voice to clone.
And so when you’re using WhatsApp or some other means of talking to the person, you literally are believing, think that you’re talking to someone live. And so this elderly woman was contacted through social media. The storyline apparently was that Tom was, you know, trying to have… Friendships now that he’s no longer in the limelight. And so this lady, this elderly lady, thought that she was communicating with Tom Selleck. And so I want us to think about if deep fake and voice cloning technology was used and she didn’t know it existed, she thought she was literally having live communications with Tom Selick.
Well, eventually remember what we say, you build a trust. The next phase of the trust is to come up with a lie to try to extract money out of you. Right, so with romance scams, it is, oh, I’m out of the country, I forgot my passport, I need you to send some money. Or, I am out of country and I’ve got some money coming into me, but I can’t get the check just yet, since money, so there’s always some reason why the person needs the money. By the time they’ve built your trust up, you believe their story, and so then you send them the money, and so that’s another red flag, is that somebody who. Should be well off is asking you for money. The second part of it is, how are they asking you to pay for the money? Many times the romance scammers are asking for cryptocurrency, which is digital currency. That’s not a normal way to give anybody any money.
Juravich: I wouldn’t know how to send Tom Selleck Bitcoin, okay. That would take me a minute.
Johnson: Okay, and sometimes the person doesn’t know how to do that, but what they do tell them to do is to go to the bank, withdraw just under $10,000. We’ve got laws surrounding money laundering and it would trigger reports if we withdraw more, 10,000 or more, but just underneath that amount, put it in a package, somebody will come and pick it up. That is common in non-celebrity romance scams, where the person will come pick it and then they say, I’m going to pay you back soon.
And unfortunately, this lady fell for the scam. She started taking money out. Her son realized what was going on, tried to stop her and told her that Tom Selleck would not be having any relationship with her. They got a good friend in to come and speak with her, still could not be convinced that she was not talking to the real Tom Slleck. By the time her husband found out, she had literally given away most of their life savings. And unfortunately, he killed her and he killed himself. So it was a murder-suicide as a result of it. Again, it’s an extreme example, but it’s the example that people need to realize because sometimes people who have been victims are so embarrassed that they think taking their lives is a solution.
Juravich: I mean, Kenyatta, again, that’s another, it’s another tragic story, but it also tells the story of how deep you can get into this. I mean for them to have no life savings, they couldn’t see a way out. Does something like that, I’m guessing, doesn’t surprise you, but makes you sad, right?
Bagby: It does make me sad, but again, it does not surprise me. We’ve had calls into the Consumer Affairs Complaint Line about different scams that our seniors have faced over the last couple of years. We had one call where a woman over the age of 60 sat for so long at a convenience store, or stood for so at a convenient store, feeding the Bitcoin ATM that the attendant at the convenience store brought her a chair. She had been loading cash into the machine for so long that he actually felt sorry for her and brought her a chair.
Juravich: Oh, man.
Bagby: We’ve had discussions with family members who have talked about their senior having to change their eating habits because of, or what they’re spending at the grocery store because they’ve been taken for everything that they had. So their budget has changed. So hearing that saddens me, yes, but it does not surprise me at all. Hmm.
Juravich: So the last time you were here Kenyatta, we talked about QR code scams and I have been thinking about that ever since because I had never, the example you gave was parking apps around town, around the city, where they were putting a different QR code sticker on top of the actual parking app sticker and people were paying to park. But they were actually not paying to park, right? You alerted me that. It’s something I never thought about. And now every time I scan a QR code, I have a moment where I think of you. So tell me about these QR code scams. How can we protect ourselves? How can make sure the QR code we’re scanning at the restaurant on the parking app sign is real?
Bagby: So first of all, you wanna make sure, if you don’t have to scan a QR code, then don’t. That’s number one. But if you are scanning to park, make sure that you actually check the URL when you scan the code. Make sure that the URL is what you expect it to be. So if you’re scanning the code and you’re at a restaurant or parking, make sure the URL is going directly to the place where you are. So if you are at Chili’s or some type of restaurant, make sure that the URL references that place where are. If you’re paying to park, make sure it’s actually going to the park. There are no misspelled words, there are no extra characters in there. Make sure that URL is what you’re expecting it to be. Also, instead of scanning, maybe sometime before you go, Download the app so that you’re working directly in the app instead of having to say you initiated. Yeah
Juravich: Well, Professor Johnson, I mean, the idea of scanning the QR code and paying for the wrong parking, that’s just like a couple bucks, you know, like three or four dollars, as opposed to your life savings. But I mean tell me about the idea of being scammed out of just a few dollars versus your life savings. I mean it happens, I’m sure a lot to people that they are scammed out of a few dollars and maybe they don’t even realize it. Is that possible?
Johnson: Yeah, it happens. And for example, around OSU, if you’ve scanned the wrong QR code, we’ve had students thinking they had paid properly, and then it turns out they had not, and so they got a ticket later because they scanned a fake QR code. But the important thing about the small dollar scams, most people don’t report small dollar scam. And so in my research. There are very few lawsuits or indictments of perpetrators of those type of scams because they’re small dollar amounts.
When you’re looking at the IC3 report, the FBI’s report or the FTC report, we’re talking about millions and billions of dollars. So for example, I wanted to make sure we highlight the age group and I didn’t remember if you had said it. 60 and up, the IC-3 report shows Americans 60, years old and older lost $7.5 billion last year. And then if we look at that group in Ohio, that same group lost 100, just Ohio, 60 and over, lost 164 million.
So we need to be focusing on the big dollar scams where the person is calling you and asking you to do what I call get money and transfer it in a abnormal way. So if you’ve never in your life wired money to someone and all of a sudden somebody wants you to wire money, that’s a red flag, right? If you pay your bills by check and now all of sudden, or by credit card, now they want you to use a cash app to send money or some other peer-to-peer payment system. And the reason why they want you to to use those methods to pay is because they’re hard to reverse.
So for example, if the scammer gets you to take the cash out of your bank and go feed it into the Bitcoin machine, or put it in a package and hand it over to a courier, that’s almost always irreversible. So there was a recent case involving someone who sued Athena. Athena is a Bitcoin company because he had fallen for a scam and fed something like I think $60,000. Into a Bitcoin machine. He told the local police, the local place physically seized the machine and was waiting for a court order to give it back to him. Well, Athena fought and actually won the case. And that’s because the court looked at what actually happens in the process. So if you’re at a Bitcoin Machine, which none of us have used, but I know because of having read this, is that All along, Bitcoin is giving you warnings and alerts before you get to the next phase. And before you go to that last screen that says, are you done? Do you want to finalize? It warns you. Yeah.
Juravich: So the company was basically like, you did this, it’s our money now.
Johnson: But the scammers had told the elderly gentleman, just ignore all that, ignore all of that. And that’s why we’re back to my mantra, stop, don’t reply, go verify, right? You go, okay, if this is really a problem, I need to go find a legitimate organization to tell me how to fix the problem. Fixing the problem is not what I’m calling weird payment method. Methods, such as feeding money into a Bitcoin or cryptocurrency ATM.
Juravich: Our guests this hour are Criolla Johnson, an Ohio State University law professor and Kenyetta Bagby, Community Outreach Director for the Ohio Department of Commerce. Coming up, we’re going to talk about what happens when you report a scam and when and how to report them. That is When All Sides Continues on 89.7 NPR News.
You’re listening to All Sides. I’m your host, Amy Juravich. Whether it’s life insurance, health care, money, or even their homes, senior citizens are vulnerable to scams. As a result, they are often targeted because of their trusting nature and their possible inexperience with modern digital threats. From romance scams to pretending to be a grandchild having an emergency to someone impersonating Tom Selleck, there are a lot of ways that the elderly are being targeted. We’re talking about how seniors can protect themselves from scams this hour, and how we can protect ourselves as well. And still with us is Kenyetta Bagby, Community Outreach Director for the Ohio Department of Commerce. Thanks for being here.
Bagby: My pleasure.
Juravich: And Creola Johnson, an Ohio State University law professor. Thanks for being here, Cree. Thank you. I wanted to talk about reporting a scam. So Kenyetta, if you’ve been scammed, should you report it?
Bagby: Absolutely. There are several ways that you can report. You can report to the Consumer Affairs Office via our website com.ohio.gov. You can also report through the Ohio Division of Securities. We have a protection hotline 877-683-7841. You You can also protect or report through the Ohio Adult Protective Services referral line. And through the attorney general’s office.
Juravich: Do you ever like does reporting help catch the people? I mean, I guess I just want to be like what will happen if I report it?
Bagby: So, depending on the information level that we get, the Ohio Office of Consumer Affairs does not do any investigation, but we can refer that information to the Securities Department or the Attorney General’s Office, who then will or can investigate. And with the Securies Office, if there is an outcome with that investigation, there is the potential to. Um, not be made whole, but to receive some funding back that you have lost. So reporting really does help us not only get the person, um, and that their investigation and get them information about, um getting some of their monies back, but it also allows us to, uh, forewarn the community about the scams that we’re hearing about.
Juravich: Yeah, I have to imagine that even if it’s a small scam and you just lost a few dollars, but if someone tells you about it, for example, the QR code on the parking app, then you can warn people that this is happening, right? Or you can go and physically.
Bagby: Someone take the stickers down. Absolutely. And one of the things about the QR code is it starts with a very small amount, but then it morphs into them maxing out your credit card. So it seemingly feels like a small amount a two or three dollar parking ticket or a two or $3 parking payment. But it generally morphs in to your entire card or bank account being taken advantage of.
Juravich: Professor Johnson, what do you want to add about why we should report the scams?
Johnson: So the Federal Trade Commission, which is the oldest federal agency which has as its mission protecting consumers, they can open up investigations. So if enough people complain, that’s going to lead to an investigation. And it doesn’t even have to be scams. So if you guys think about maybe a few years ago, stretchers, excuse me, Skechers had sneakers that they claim would… Give you a certain advantage.
Juravich: Oh yeah, I forgot about those.
Johnson: Right. And so there were enough investigations and so the Federal Trade Commission, even if it’s not a scam, investigations can be started and then lawsuits can be brought. If it’s a civil lawsuit, we can stop the company or bad actors from doing or saying things that are false. If it turns out to be a complete scam, they can refer that to the FBI. The FBI takes numerous referrals, especially when there’s financial losses. And they can investigate, and they have tools that are far more capable than the FTC to be able to do forensic accounting. In other words, to go back and figure out where did this actually start? Because many of our scams are actually starting overseas in foreign call centers, and that’s part of the reason why our Do Not Call registry doesn’t work.
And so that’s important, and so for the listening audience, they should report fraud to ftc.gov, or you could go to ohioattorneygeneral.gov and you can submit a complaint. The attorney general can sue. So for example, right now, the attorney general’s office has sued a business based in Cincinnati where they’ve been selling things on Amazon as new products. And the alleged allegations is that the product, this is a vacuum cleaner, that the vacuum cleaner is actually not new, but that it’s used. And so reporting does help in all sorts of ways besides just leading to public service announcements and warnings. And specifically, if you think you’ve been a victim of a crime, report it to local law enforcement because they can also get the ball rolling if we need federal law enforcement involved.
Juravich: All right. I want to spend a few minutes before we run out of time talking about more about protecting ourselves, especially protecting seniors. Kenyetta, what do you hear from people where maybe they don’t know what’s going on with their parents’ finances, but they want to know, they want to help, they they want to be that extra check to make sure that their loved one is not giving money to someone impersonating Tom Selleck.
Bagby: Start off by just having the conversation about finances with your seniors. And not just the seniors, but with everyone. Have those conversations. Know and understand what your senior is doing with their money. And especially if they are having a budget each month. Family members need to know and have the conversation with their seniors about how that money is being spent. If they’re changes in their withdrawal from the bank, those are things that family members will want to know as well. So it doesn’t hurt to have a trusted contact linked to your account so that if your senior comes in and wants to withdraw that little less than $10,000 from their account, someone is contacted to verify that this is a legitimate withdrawal, that they’re actually buying that boat and not just being pressured or told to lie to their. Financial institutions so that they can withdraw the money.
Juravich: A lot of transactions though now, there’s fewer and fewer transactions that actually involve going to the bank and taking out a chunk of cash. Everyone is using Zelle or Venmo or PayPal to transfer money back and forth. And I have people in my life who are skeptical of Venmo and then I have other people in my live who use Venmo 10 times a day. It’s the only way to transfer back and forward and pay someone back is all through Venmo. So what do you tell people about whether they should trust things like Venmo, Zell, PayPal?
Bagby: Well, a lot of our seniors don’t know those apps. They don’t those types of money movers, money transmitter apps. So they’re not doing that. They’re not very financials, or they’re very technology savvy. So they are still going to the branch because they have a relationship with the branch manager or. Those working in the branch so they want to be somewhere where they can talk to someone and tell them the wonderful things that they’re Doing a lot of seniors don’t have that savvy tech savvy Nature so they’re not using all of those apps But for the ones that are they need to know that if you’re not paying your bills through those apps Which they shouldn’t be then don’t start doing it So those are the the types of conversations you should have with your seniors. If you’re not paying your mortgage through Zill or Cash App, listen, don’t start now. Yeah, yeah. What would you like to add, Professor Johnson?
Johnson: So I’m gonna be a little bit more forceful and say, if you’ve got a senior citizen in your life, you should go to the bank with that senior citizen in person and be listed as a contact person in the event the bank flags suspicious activity. If the senior person in your is declining in terms of remembering and so forth. You can actually get a power of attorney so that you are, and it could be a financial power of attorney where you are maybe not making decisions. So I don’t want anybody getting afraid that I’m saying your kid takes over. It could be limited power of an attorney that allows the bank to be able to tell and communicate with your loved one so that if something suspicious happens.
So if we go back to the Tom Selleck situation, right? If there had been a limited power of attorney, that the woman was literally withdrawing thousands of dollars at a time, right? So a limited amount of power of an attorney would say, okay, cannot withdraw that money unless the spouse and other people come into the bank and are in agreement with it. That could be a way to limit the ability of a scammer to convince you to give over thousands of money if you have a limited of power attorney. And then I don’t want people to think this is gonna cost a lot of money. They’ve got power of attorney documents that you can find online. Your local library, the notary, most local libraries have a notary or a staff person who has a notarization who can notarize the signatures so that it can be recognized as a document that the bank will agree to in order to be able to communicate you. And that loved one can be the first line of attack to make sure money doesn’t leave the account for abnormal things. In other words, you’re taking out money as opposed to just writing a check to cover your mortgage.
Juravich: Mm-hmm. Okay. Okay well we have one minute left so if anyone wants to just give one last tip to end on
Bagby: My tip would be if you, whether you recognize the phone numbers or not for people calling in, trying to build a relationship or build your trust through phone or text, if you don’t recognize the phone number, just don’t answer the phone. Let them leave a message. If it’s a reputable company, they’ll leave a message and you use the number you know to contact them. And email.
Johnson: We didn’t talk about that. Do not click on email messages. Scammers are out there spoofing email addresses to make it look like it’s coming from Amazon or your bank or some other trusted institution. If there’s a problem, don’t click on the link in the email. Go out into your own browser or into your app and contact the company through that way.
Juravich: We have been talking about scams and how to protect ourselves from scams, and we have been talking with Kenyetta Bagby, Community Outreach Director for the Ohio Department of Commerce. Thanks for being here today. Thank you. And we’ve also been talking with Professor Creola Johnson, a professor at Ohio State University’s Moritz College of Law. Thanks for joining us today.
Johnson: People want to learn more, you can go to my website, thescamnation.org, thescammnation.org.
Juravich: This has been All Sides. On 89.7 NPR News, I’m Amy Juravich. Thanks for joining us.
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