We’ve been seeing more scams lately and unfortunately, it’s not uncommon for our senior citizens to fall victim to a scammer.
Washoe County wants to help our local seniors from falling victim to scams, so they invited the Better Business Bureau to talk about scams and scam prevention.
They are hoping senior citizens will take the information and learn from it to help them avoid scams in the future, because they say being educated is the best thing you can be against scam artists.
According to Timothy Johnston from the Better Business Bureau there are some scams going around that are more common than others right now.
“Overall imposter scams are really the most reported, he said. “That would be somebody pretending to be social security, revenue service, but it could also be somebody pretending to be Amazon saying ‘hey we know someone bought a $1,000 iPhone on your account.’ You get upset about it and engage with a scammer and they get information from you.”
Johnston tells us the riskiest scams overall for those 65 plus are investment crypto currency scams and romance scams.
“Sometimes scammers might find it easier to contact our seniors. Seniors are more likely to pick up a phone especially if they have a landline. Maybe they don’t have the ability to see who called them, so we find that in reports to the Federal Trade Commission last year scammers used a phone second most often when it comes to perpetuating schemes and scams. So it’s not just happening online, its happening the old-fashioned way whether you have a smart phone or a landline.”
But how often does it happen?
Johnston explains “Scams happen every day and they impact all age groups, as far as knowing how many are being impacted it’s really tough because only about 5% of individuals actually report being a victim of a scam, so we encourage people if you see a scam report it whether you lost money or not.”
If you do report a scam, you could be helping others from getting scammed as well.
The BBB says if you have lost money due to a scam to reach out to law enforcement immediately. You can also use the BBB scam tracker as a way to report scams by clicking here.
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