Imagine you have received a late-night call from your grandson who states he’s in a Mexican prison. He tells you that he is locked up for narcotics and he needs $10,000 desperately to get released.
Would you wire the money?
In an excited state while listening on a scratchy telephone line, would you be able to tell for certain that the caller was in fact your grandson? Some scammers have been known to use artificial intelligence (AI) to clone the loved one’s voice. With a short audio clip – perhaps from content posted online – and a voice-cloning program, scammers can call and sound just like the grandson. Scammers are good at pretending to be someone that they’re not.
Sadly, scenarios like this do occur when scam artists ply their evil trade against elderly and vulnerable grandparents. Some victims have spent their life savings to rescue their beloved grandchildren in need, only to later discover that they have been tricked by unscrupulous crooks.
The FBI calls this crime the “Grandparent Scam.” The scam takes advantage of the love and concern of grandparents.
According to the FBI, a scammer calls a senior citizen victim and poses as the victim’s grandchild, who is purportedly in jail. Another scammer contacts the victim, posing as the grandchild’s attorney, and requests payment for legal fees, bond money or medical expenses for a purportedly injured person involved in the accident.
Scammers instruct victims to maintain secrecy, sometimes referring to a judge-imposed gag order, which, if broken, will result in the grandchild going to jail or incurring more fines.
Scammers instruct victims to send funds via wire transfer; cash, packaged in magazines or books, and sent through the U.S. mail.
According to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center, they have been receiving complaints about the grandparent scam since 2008.
“But the scam and scam artists have become more sophisticated,” the FBI noted. “Thanks to the internet and social networking sites, a criminal can sometimes uncover personal information about their targets, which makes the impersonations more believable. For example, the actual grandson may mention on his social networking site that he’s a photographer who often travels to Mexico. When contacting the grandparents, the phony grandson will say he’s calling from Mexico, where someone stole his camera equipment and passport.”
In some cases, the caller claims to be a foreign police officer, a lawyer or a doctor who is calling on the grandchild’s behalf.
“We’ve also seen military families victimized: after perusing a soldier’s social networking site, a con artist will contact the soldier’s grandparents, sometimes claiming that a problem came up during military leave that requires money to address.”
The FBI advises victims to resist pressure to act too quickly. Try to contact your loved one or another family member to determine if the call is in fact legitimate. And never wire money based on a call or email, especially overseas. Wiring money is like handing over cash. You can’t get it back.
One can also ask the caller a personal question only the loved one would know. Or use a phone number that is known to the grandparents and ask if the grandchild is truly in trouble.
Scammers instruct you to pay in a specific way. They often insist that you can only pay in ways that make it tough to get your money back by wiring money through a company like Western Union.
The FBI notes that the financial losses in these cases – while they can be substantial for an individual, usually several thousand dollars per victim – typically don’t meet the FBI’s financial thresholds for opening an investigation. The FBI suggests that if you have been scammed, contact local authorities or the state consumer protection agency.
The FBI also suggests that a victim file a complaint with IC3, which not only forwards complaints to the appropriate agencies, but collates and analyzes the data — looking for common threads that link complaints and help identify the crooks. ••
Paul Davis’s Crime Beat column appears here each week. He can be reached via pauldavisoncrime.com.
