Arrow-right Camera
The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

AARP program aims to protect older Americans from scams

Cheryl Reed Weber, a community outreach director with AARP, hands out sign-up sheets for the Fraud Watch Network on Tuesday in Spokane Valley. (Tyler Tjomsland)

Con artists aren’t just targeting the stereotypical old lady at home. It happened just last week to the wife of one of the nation’s experts on online safety – a man who literally locks his laptop to the hotel toilet when he travels so it and his information isn’t stolen and sold.

“My laptop is chained in my (car) trunk right now,” Christopher Burgess said Tuesday after speaking at the AARP and Washington Attorney General’s “scam jam” conference in the Spokane Valley.

Burgess, retired from the CIA, is the co-founder of the startup online security company Revendra in Woodinville, Washington. Needing to send last-minute flowers, Burgess’ wife found a so-called florist company online that would deliver on Sundays. The flowers were never received and after a quick Google search, it was obvious the company was fake and that she had been scammed. Luckily, the order was put on a credit card so after reporting the fraud, the Burgesses got their money back from the credit card company who then went after the scammer.

The theme that even the savviest person can get caught off-guard and taken was repeated often during the free conference where more than 300 people attended to learn about how to protect themselves, their identity and their money.

The top tips: Never transfer or wire money, ask lots of questions, and take time before making decisions so you can research the person or company. These warnings meshed with the old, familiar tips of not giving out your credit card numbers, Social Security number or other personal information to people who call you unsolicited. Yet a new survey for the AARP shows that just following the traditional “do and don’t list” isn’t enough to inoculate users from victimization. People are a lot more vulnerable if they have recently lost a job, feel isolated or had a death in the family, the survey said.

AARP has access to 15 years of video interviews with con men, who commonly admitted to using people’s emotions to get their money and identity. One man referred to it as the “emotional Achilles’ heel.”

Attendees were told one way to protect yourself is to sign up for a service such as the AARP Fraud Watch Network, which was created in Washington state and recently launched nationally, to access information on identity theft, investment fraud and the latest scams. People who sign up receive watchdog alerts about scams.

“We’re not trying to scare people,” Tina Kondo, the assistant regional director of the Fair Trade Commission, told the crowd of mostly retirees. “We’re trying to empower people with information.”

Reports show that older Americans lose $2.9 billion each year to identity theft and fraud. The FTC said reports of consumer fraud have increased by more than 60 percent since 2008 and online scams doubled to nearly 40 percent of all fraud in 2011.

Just last week news headlines reported the latest security breaches with Home Depot, and Apple’s iCloud had been hacked. These problems affect everyone, not just senior citizens. Yet seniors are a big target not only because there are a lot of them, but because they likely have accumulated lifetime savings.

Identity theft, debt collection, banking and mortgage, impostor scams – such as the IRS scam in which people are conned into wiring money for back taxes – phone scams and prizes such as foreign lotteries topped the consumer complaints in 2013, Kondo said.

A survey conducted by the GFK Group in November and December for AARP shows that common life stressors such as the death of a family member, illness, job loss, and isolation contribute largely to victimization. If a person already has poor online behavior – such as opening emails from unknown sources, clicking pop-up ads or signing up for free trial offers – they are even more likely to fall for a scam if they are approached at a vulnerable time in their live.

“It sucks up your cognizant capacity,” said Doug Shadel, state director of AARP Washington. “You don’t have the same defense system.”

Nearly 1 million Washington Internet users demonstrated at least seven of the 15 key online risk factors identified by the survey. It also showed that 77 percent of online users in the state are concerned about being scammed online, yet only half could pass a simple online literacy test for online safety. For example, 45 percent of respondents were unaware that the existence of a privacy policy doesn’t always mean a website won’t share information with other companies.

Burgess reminded people to practice “cyber hygiene” – change computer passwords often, don’t use your children’s or pets names and don’t use the same password for every account. He added people must keep software up to date, use virus protection systems and most of all don’t share too much personal information on social media sites. He said even using genealogy sites such as Ancestory.com and using your actual name to sign up could provide scammers with valuable information.

Attorney General Bob Ferguson spoke at the conference and told how his own mother nearly got caught in an email scam that appeared as if her longtime friend had an emergency while traveling overseas and needed money.

“I don’t think she would have fallen for it but not every lady in her 80s has her son as the attorney general looking out for her,” Ferguson said, encouraging people to report scam attempts to his office and sign up for alerts from the Fraud Watch Network.

The office received 5,000 calls from senior citizens reporting scams or fraud last year, which is 100 reports each week, he said, adding that many incidents go unreported.

“To get the bad guys, we are completely dependent on folks like you to call our office,” Ferguson said.

Laura Day, 71, of the Spokane Valley, attended the workshop to sharpen her skills and was surprised to find out her old Windows XP computer is super vulnerable and no longer receiving security updates from Microsoft.

“Knowledge is power,” she said. “The more I know the safer I’m going to be.”