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Retirees Are at Home When Con Artists Call

By Dan Cuff, New York Times

March 18, 2003

There is something about being older that is supposed to make for vulnerability to the pitches of confidence men. The experts who study fraud have laid out a number of reasons why older people, presumably with fewer of their faculties intact, are more likely than younger people to be duped by tricksters who come to their door or waylay them on the telephone.

"Older people aren't all the same, but in general they tend to be more trusting," said Susan Grant, director of the National Fraud Information Center of the National Consumers League. "They are home to get things like telemarketing calls or have the time to sit down and look at the junk mail that arrives, and they're also good targets for con artists because they have money they have amassed to live on in their golden years."

It's not that older people are incompetent, Ms. Grant added, "but they are interested in good deals, and if something sounds like a good deal they tend to trust the person offering it," she said.

In other words, not all victims are blithering idiots, which is reassuring to hear. This 70-year-old reporter thought he was losing it when he recently fell for a telemarketing scheme and paid $60.90 for two packages of garbage bags, on the premise that the exorbitant price would help handicapped workers. Every day, people buy overpriced garbage bags, light bulbs and room fresheners from commercial telemarketing companies that are not charities but say they hire the handicapped, whether they do or not. The game goes on despite a Federal Trade Commission order in 2000 (that I found on the Internet, alas, too late) against several companies that agreed to stop representing such purchases as benefiting the handicapped or disabled.

"False appeals to consumers' charitable nature just to fill your own pockets is a despicable act," the F.T.C. said at the time, adding, "legitimate fund-raisers won't push you to give on the spot."

That advice is one of hundreds of tips from dozens of organizations committed to alerting older people to the dangers of losing their money in endless variations of fraud. To name a few besides the F.T.C., there are the Postal Inspection Service, the Justice Department, AARP, the National Consumers League, the Better Business Bureau, the National Association of Attorneys General and the Consumer Federation of America.

Still, perpetrators of fraud thrive, and crimes against older people grow, the experts say. And as the first of the baby boomers approach their 60's, more victims are in the making. Perhaps it takes people like Carl Hirdler to show other older folks how to make a difference.

Mr. Hirdler, a retired chemical engineer who lives in Leisureville, a retirement community in Pompano Beach, Fla., is something of a local hero for foiling a scheme to defraud him of more than $4,000. He worked with detectives to catch two men who were eventually arrested and charged with exploitation of the elderly, grand theft and impersonating a law enforcement officer.

It all began in December, when Mr. Hirdler, who is 87 and walks with a shuffle after two strokes, received a call from someone identifying himself as the Pompano Beach police chief. The caller said that Mr. Hirdler's bank account was being raided and asked him to withdraw $4,150 as part of a plan to catch a dishonest teller.

At first "he had me suckered," Mr. Hirdler said, but he grew suspicious when the caller told him to dial 911 and ask for the police chief for verification. The "chief" apparently stayed on the line and answered when Mr. Hirdler dialed the emergency number. "There's no way I can dial 911 and get the chief," Mr. Hirdler said.

Mr. Hirdler reported his suspicions to the real police and was enlisted in a sting. Detectives watched as two men followed Mr. Hirdler as he withdrew the money. The next day the "chief" called and told Mr. Hirdler that a "security" man would come by to pick up the money. When he did, he was arrested, along with the "chief" waiting around the corner. The men were not so young themselves, 72 and 62, proving that older people can be predators as well as victims.

"This scam has been going on around here for two or three years," Mr. Hirdler said, and offered his opinion about why older people fall for the lines of confidence men. "They don't think on their feet and they can't rebut," he said. "They follow along like a bunch of sheep. In my case it was a little different, unfortunately for the con men. If they hadn't overplayed their hand on 911, they had me hooked."

The scheme to induce people to withdraw money from a bank is one of the oldest around. A newer plan is to prey on people's sympathies and solicit money in the wake of 9/11, although the experts say it has lost some steam. The most popular current telemarketing scheme is phony credit card offers to people with financial problems who are asked to pay fees of hundreds of dollars, the National Consumers League says.

The credit-card racket has replaced prizes and sweepstakes as the top telemarketing squeeze, the league says. You are told you have won a prize or a lottery but must send money before you can collect it. There is also the magazine subscription renewal dodge, where you are told that your subscription is about to run out, and you are then given a false address in which to send money.

But these are small-time swindles compared with ones that have bamboozled people out of their property and taken thousands of dollars in sham investments by slick talkers who make friends with victims over the phone. Many of the victims have been widows, lonely and unused to handling the family finances. Older people fall for moneymaking offers because they fear inflation will erode their savings or they want to leave a nest egg for their children, experts say. These schemes are so pervasive that some lawyers now specialize in what is called elder financial abuse, and work to regain stolen real estate or undo fraudulent loans.

One cruel trick involves a "recovery room" telemarketing ruse in which victims of previous telemarketing schemes are called with promises to help them get most of their money back — if they pay an upfront fee. All these devices, including home-improvement deals where the work never gets done and the bills grow higher; itinerant workers "passing through" who offer to take the dents out of your car; expensive home-equity loans; and sweetheart come-ons, are part of a horde of tricks too numerous to enumerate.

There seem to be no reliable estimates on how much money older Americans lose to these plots. Out of embarrassment, a lot of fraud is not reported. The loss to telemarketing fraud alone (all ages included) is often put at $40 billion a year, a figure that came up several years ago in Congress in connection with a telemarketing fraud bill. The experts say that nobody knows for sure, but the annual amount lost to fraud by older Americans must be in the billions.

A 1996 AARP study of 800 fraud victims age 50 and over contradicted the stereotype of lonely, addlepated dupes, says Bridget Small, director of consumer protection for AARP, the organization for middle-aged and older Americans. Most of those surveyed weren't socially isolated but were educated, held jobs, went to church and had family and friends.

They were aware of the dangers of fraud "but it was hard to spot when it was happening to them," Ms. Small said. AARP concluded that simple awareness of the problem of fraud was not enough. The organization changed its theme to emphasize that fraudulent telemarketers are criminals and that what was happening to victims was not foolish or a cause for embarrassment but a crime, and that they should end such phone calls quickly.

Ms. Grant of the consumers league concurs. "One thing we try to get older people to think about is the fact that there are people out there who are crooks that will tell you anything to get your money, and who don't lose sleep over it at night," she said.