Retired Money

By Jonathan Chevreau on June 12, 2024
Estimated reading time: 15 minutes

By Jonathan Chevreau on June 12, 2024
Estimated reading time: 15 minutes

Financial fraud is proliferating and growing ever more sophisticated. How to protect yourself and your elderly loved ones from being scammed.

You don’t have to be a senior to be aware that scams of all sorts abound in both the physical and—increasingly—the cyber world. Since Saturday, June 15 is World Elder Abuse Awareness Day, it’s an opportune time to address this problem.

Sadly, the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) has exacerbated frauds of all kinds. While anyone can fall prey to technology-enabled schemes to separate them from their money, seniors need to pay particular attention, since they have more money to lose and less time to recoup it and are often socially isolated.

Flip through the many articles on MoneySense.ca and you’ll see we have covered such topics as getting scammed through e-transfers, phishing, crypto schemes, identity theft and more. There’s financial fraud in general that targets bank accounts, credit cards and potentially every other aspect of your financial life.

It’s overwhelming, and the situation is unlikely to improve any time soon.

Frauds can be conducted by telephone, email, texting on phones and via social media, not to mention the old-fashioned knock on a homeowner’s door. In the last few weeks, there have been media reports of widespread frauds being perpetrated on Canadian Facebook users, where scammers get access to personal accounts and blitz the user’s friends and family on Facebook and other social media accounts.

According to credit reporting agency Equifax, fraud is now the top crime perpetrated against older Canadians. Sadly, many seniors fail to report these crimes to the police because they feel shame or embarrassment about being duped by scam artists. So, the impact is higher than we even realize.

Identity theft is particularly worrisome for seniors. As Equifax puts it, “a scammer may try to get information such as a bank card or personal identity number, credit-card number, health card number or a driver’s license or Social Insurance Number. They can then apply for credit cards, take out loans or withdraw funds in the person’s name.”

If you lose your wallet or discover that critical mail has gone missing, Equifax encourages you to report it to banks and credit-card companies, as well as to the law enforcement. Family members can help seniors find a secure place for personal documents and encourage them to leave items at home that they may not need, such as a Social Insurance Number card or passport.

Elder Abuse Prevention Ontario (EAPO) point out that rising senior use of smartphones and the internet is contributing to “staggering financial losses” for this demographic, including phishing and smishing.

By now most readers will be familiar with the term phishing, which EAPO defines as an online scam designed to trick you into disclosing personal or financial information for the purpose of financial fraud or identity theft. But have you heard of a similar-sounding second scam, smishing? I certainly had not until I did the research for this article.

Smishing is a similar tactic to phishing but uses SMS messaging (a.k.a. text messages on smartphones) to reach its targets. It can be dangerous because people tend to trust texts more than emails, especially when they originate from what appears to be close family members or friends. As I was writing this article, two family members and I all experienced smishing attempts on our smartphones.)

Defensive tactics against either are similar: don’t click on links in unsolicited emails or unsolicited text messages. If it’s possible to find a phone number on a genuine site—not the one contained in a suspicious email or text message—try phoning it to confirm the activity is legitimate. Even if it appears to come from a family member or friend, be suspicious if they ask you to buy something out of the blue, like gift cards or transfer money. (Read: “Can I get scammed through an e-transfer?”

But not all modern scams depend on the internet. Even the old-fashioned telephone can be the gateway to a scam. You’ve probably read media reports of the so-called “grandparents scam,” where a con artist pretends to be a grandchild in some crisis situation requiring the immediate........

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