What Is Elder Fraud and How Can You Stay Safe?
It’s prudent to make financial commitments and investments to provide for your well-being in old age. Losing all of this money to criminals is devastating, to say the least. Unfortunately, this can happen with elder frauds.
Cybercriminals dedicate their time to defrauding seniors of their hard-earned money. Empower yourself with knowledge of how elderly frauds work and how to prevent them, so you don’t become a victim.
What Are Elder Frauds?
Elder frauds are criminal activities targeted at seniors. For various reasons, elders are sometimes more trusting of people or more easily confused when dealing with online devices. Crooks capitalize on these characteristics to swindle seniors, who often have built some wealth from their years of working.
Criminals’ motive for all financial frauds may be the same—to extort money from victims. But the dynamics are different with elderly frauds as they deploy specific tactics that aging people are most likely to fall for. Elderly frauds are common around the world as seniors share similar characteristics.
How Do Elder Frauds Work?
There arevarious kinds of frauds that target seniors, but most of them fall under two major categories: medical frauds and financial frauds.
Medical Frauds
Our health conditions degenerate as we get older, so we require more medical attention. Seniors have more healthcare needs than younger people. Threat actors use their condition to defraud them by offering false medical services and benefits.
Health insurance scam is common among seniors. Criminals contact them with false healthcare services to collect their personal information and money. They could text or call you, claiming to be part of a government healthcare initiative for seniors. If they don’t ask you to sign up with a fee, they may ask for your personally identifiable information such as your credit card details, social security number, bank information, etc. to add you to their beneficiary list.
In the US, scammers also leverage Medicare services for elder frauds. Since many seniors are on Medicare, scammers pretend to be from a legitimate Medicare provider. Once they have your attention, they claim that your current plan is about to expire and ask you to pay for a new card, so you don’t lose your coverage.
Financial Frauds
The end game for criminals in most elder frauds is to defraud seniors of their money, so they cook up all kinds of gimmicks to rope them in. These frauds take various forms including investment schemes, lottery scams, and mortgage scams.
Take investment schemes, for instance, where threat actors offer seniors incredible short-term investment opportunities. Since many elders have immersed some money over the years, they can invest. Threat actors try to extort them with false investments such as illegitimate bonds, ponzi schemes, and non-existent investments.
For lottery scams, criminals inform their targets about winning a significant amount of money in a lottery. But to claim the prize, the supposed winners have to pay a small amount.
Seniors are also victims of mortgage-related scams. Having planned to own their own homes in retirement, they have a keen interest in mortgage matters. Intruders take advantage of this interest to defraud them.
Why Do Scammers Target Elders?
People of different age groups are victims of cybercrimes. But there are particular reasons why cybercriminals target seniors in elder frauds.
They Have Money
No matter how effective a threat actor’s antics are, they can hardly get any money from a broke person. We can’t say that all seniors are rich, but the majority of them are richer than their younger counterparts. And that’s because they have had more years to work and create wealth.
Most elders who worked either in paid employment or were self-employed have pensions and other retirement financial plans. Attackers target seniors for access to these funds.
They Are Isolated
Many elders don’t have the luxury of having their family around in old age; they stay in elder homes. While they may get the care they need, they often lack strong emotional connections, especially with family and friends.
When criminals send seniors fraudulent messages, they don’t have close people they can talk to about the messages. They end up making decisions without being well-informed.
They Aren’t Tech Savvy and Security Conscious
It takes some level of tech savviness and cybersecurity awareness to prevent online scams. Inphishing scams where criminals trick users with false messages, it can be difficult to spot the lie if you aren’t cybersecurity conscious.
When someone contacts you out of the blue andseeks your personally identifiable information, their intentions are hardly genuine. Even if you don’t reveal information to them, they may send you malware-infected content. Seniors may open the content out of ignorance and compromise their accounts.
How to Prevent Elder Scams
Preventing elderly scams begin with developing a consciousness of these scams. You must understand that criminals specifically target seniors for online fraud. With that in mind, you can practice the following precautions.
Build a Support System
Building a support system is a non-technical but vital way of protecting yourself against fraud as a senior. Talking to people who care about you allows you to get second opinions on issues, especially in cyberspace.
Instead of acting on a strange message, you can share it with your family and friends who are more knowledgeable about such things. They can spot red flags in seemingly legitimate offers, and dissuade you from indulging the senders.
Don’t Disclose Your Financial Information to Strangers
Criminals will try their luck by asking for your financial information in one way or the other. They may do that through a supposed investment scheme or medical service. Whatever the case may be, don’t entertain them.
Have it at the back of your mind that your financial institutions won’t ask you for your personally identifiable information via proxy. If anyone does that, it’s a clue of foul play.
Be Wary of Giveaway Messages
Lottery scams are one of the oldest and most effective financial frauds aimed at seniors. It’s exciting to receive a message about winning a prize in a lottery. But before you engage the sender, ask yourself if you participated in any lottery in the first place.
Even if the said lottery is familiar to you, verify their claims thoroughly before giving them an audience. The minute they ask you to make a payment to redeem your prize, know that it’s a scam. They should be the ones giving you money, not the other way around.
Use a Password Manager
Threat actors get elder fraud victims' personal information with unauthorized access to their accounts. One way to do that is to figure out their passwords. An attacker can hack your account with brute force by guessing your password right. To prevent this,use strong and unique passwordsfor all your online accounts.
Creating and remembering complex passwords is a hassle for seniors. Save yourself mental trouble byusing a safe and effective password managerfor that purpose. Not only will it help you create strong and unique passwords, but it’ll also sync them with your devices.
Seek Support to Prevent Elder Frauds
It’s okay to take preventive measures against elder fraud yourself. But most importantly, you need to seek the support of the people around you. In addition to the assistance of family and friends, you can also get help from relevant agencies.
In some countries, there are designated helplines for seniors who suspect that they are targets of fraud. Reach out to the authorities if you have any reasons to believe that something is amiss, and they’ll help you accordingly.
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