Recently, 25 Canadians were arrested in a joint Canadian and American law enforcement effort and charged in federal court in Vermont with operating the grandparent scam through call centers in Canada where they contacted elderly victims in 45 American states between 2021 and 2024 during which time they are accused of stealing $21 million from their victims.
According to the indictment the accused scammers used voice-over-internet protocol service to place their calls and make them appear to come from locations in the United States. Voice-over-internet protocol enables you to cheaply make phone calls using a broadband Internet connection that converts voices into a digital signal.
The calls were made from large call centers in Montreal to elderly Americans in 45 states including Vermont from the summer of 2021 until June 4, 2024, when Canadian law enforcement executed search warrants at several call centers in Montreal. At the time of the execution of the warrants, some of the defendants were found to be making calls to targeted elderly victims in Virginia.
The defendants making the calls were referred to by their fellow conspirators as “openers.” Following a prepared script, the openers would falsely claim that the targeted elderly victim’s relative, most often a grandchild, had been arrested after a car crash and needed money for bail. The opener would also tell the scam victim that there was a gag order issued by the court that prevented the elderly victim from telling anyone about their relative’s arrest.
Each opener was provided with a spreadsheet containing the name, home address, phone number age, and estimated household income of each of their targeted victims.
Once the victim had been convinced that their relative had been arrested, the call was passed off to another scammer at the call center posing as an attorney representing the elderly victim’s relative. After the victim was convinced to provide the phony bail money, a co-conspirator in the United States would go to the elderly victim’s home to collect the money. In other instances, the victim was instructed to mail the money to the address of a vacant residence where other conspirators would be waiting to retrieve the funds.
As is not unusual in scams such as this, once a victim had made a payment, often they would be contacted again and told that the amount of the bail had been increased and the victim needed to make an additional payment.
Funds collected were sent to Canada where in an effort to launder the funds they were converted to cryptocurrencies and eventually converted to Canadian dollars.
THE GRANDPARENT SCAM
I am sure by now all of you are familiar with the grandparent scam where, in its most common variation, a grandparent receives a telephone call from someone purporting to be their grandchild who has gotten into some trouble, most commonly a traffic accident, legal trouble or medical problems in a faraway place. The caller pleads with the grandparent to send money immediately to help resolve the problem. The caller also begs the grandparent not to tell mom and dad. One would think that no one would be gullible enough to fall for this scam, but don’t be so hard on the victims of this scam. Scam artists have a knowledge of psychology which Freud would have envied and are able to use that knowledge to persuade their victims to send money right away. In addition, there is a physiological reason that contributes to the elderly being more easily scammed. A study at the University of Iowa found negative changes in a part of the brain as we age that controls belief and doubt that makes older people less skeptical and more likely to become a scam victim.
HOW CAN YOU PROTECT YOUR FAMILY?
Scammers often use the nicknames of the grandchildren when speaking to their intended victims. Sometimes they get this information from social media while in other instances they get this information from reading obituaries which may contain the names of grandchildren so merely because the correct name is used in the call is no reason to believe the call. Don’t respond immediately to such a call without calling the real grandchild on his or her cell phone or call the parents and confirm the whereabouts of the grandchild. If a medical problem is the ruse used, you can call the real hospital. If legal problems are the hook you can call the real police. You can also test the caller with a question that could be answered only by the real grandchild, but make sure that it really is a question that only the real grandchild could answer and not just someone who might read the real grandchild’ s social media postings. Prudent families can also come up with a code word to use in an emergency which a scammer will never know.
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