No matter what your age, no one believes they will fall victim to a scam. However, it’s not unusual to see highly competent, smart people lose their life savings to a scamming criminal.

At United Senior Services (USS), we often hear about local seniors falling for scams and online fraud, and that’s why we have stepped up our efforts to educate and protect local seniors.

While seniors have often been targeted by telephone solicitation scams on their landline phones, with the advent of cell phones and internet activity, the opportunity to fall victim to one of these scams is constantly increasing.

And, it’s not surprising that the internet makes everyone more susceptible to scams because of the information that it makes available – the way we vote, whether we have just lost a spouse, where we live, the value of our home, whether we’ve made sizable charitable donations – all of that information is available online to anyone.

At USS, we are doing our part to establish working relationships throughout the community with bankers, social workers, the police, and Elder Justice Unit of the Ohio Attorney General’s Office in effort to educate and protect older Ohioans, like you, from cyber exploitation.

Statistics show, and we know, that older people can be more at risk because they are isolated, lonely or may long for attention. Among the most vulnerable are the recently widowed.

USS offers educational programs on how to protect yourself from scams. However, there are several red flag warning signs for a variety of scam scenarios, including romance scams, which often originate on social media sites.

Helpful Tips for Seniors

Beware when:

• A new friend or romantic interest sends a picture that looks more like a magazine model than a regular snapshot.
• They want to move communication with you away from the social media site to communicate directly.
• Communications most often occur by text and never FaceTime. They often promise to meet you in person, however there are always excuses and it never happens.

Protect yourself by:

• Taking it slow and asking a lot of questions. Listen well and watch for inconsistencies that might reveal the person to be an imposter.
• Check the photo using “search by image” on Google to see if the picture shows up elsewhere with a different name attached to it, a sign the scammer may have stolen it.
• Be wary of flirtatious and overly complimentary emails. Copy and paste the text into a search engine to see if the same words show up on websites dedicated to exposing romance scams.
• Cut off contact immediately if you suspect the individual may be a swindler.
• Notify the dating site, messaging site, dating app or online community on which you met the scammer.

Never:

• Assume because you were the first to make contact that the person on a website or dating site is not a scammer. Swindlers flood websites with fake profiles and assumed identities and wait for victims to come to them.
• Reveal too much personal information to someone you’ve chatted with only online.
• Provide intimate photos to an online acquaintance that could later be used for extortion.
• Send cash or a reloadable gift card to someone you’ve only chatted with online. You will never get that money back.

The following telephone numbers offer good resources for those who believe they might have been victimized.

Ohio Attorney General (financial fraud/exploitation, scams): 1-800-282-0515
Federal Trade Commission (identify theft): 1-877-382-4357
Credit Freeze (Credit Card Fraud)
Equifax: 1-800-525-6285
Experian: 1-888-397-3742
Trans Union: 1-800-680-7289
Credit Report Check (Credit Card Fraud): 1-877-322-8228