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When Elizabeth Wallace took her car in for an oil change recently, a mechanic toted up nearly $700 in repairs he claimed needed to be done immediately. But instead of opening her wallet, Wallace took her car to another garage, which told her it was in tip-top shape.

"When I took my car to the first place, they said, 'Look at this, it's going to go any day. You'll be stuck on the road,' " said Wallace, a senior citizen who lives at Leisure World in Silver Spring. "But I seemed to remember that the same belts they were pointing at had just been replaced. So I just drove away."

Wallace credits her decision to seek a second opinion to her involvement with a group called Voice of the Elderly, or VOTE. The group works to educate seniors about scams and fraud.

"Those scam artists seem to be a step ahead of the general public," Wallace said. "But if a scam is publicized a lot and people know about what's out there, they're going to be more aware."

With a rallying cry of "It's shrewd to be rude," VOTE's president and founder, Leonard Burchman, tells seniors to hang up on pushy telemarketers. He tells them to just say no todeals that sound too good to be true, from contest entries promising millions of dollars in prizes to people calling and asking for credit card or Social Security numbers.

"Con artists feed on the loneliness or the depression of the elderly. They'll have these come-ons with Teflon-coated lingo. They say, 'Oh, I know how it is' and chat a while, and before you know it, they have birth dates and Social Security numbers," said Burchman, who also lives in Leisure World.
Often, seniors are more comfortable telling other seniors about how they've been bilked out of money than they are about talking to their children or police, he said.

"They say, 'I can't tell my son or daughter, or they'll put me in a nursing home,' " Burchman said.

Instead, some seniors send reams of mail to VOTE, describing such questionable marketing practices as coming home to find the voice of Charlton Heston on their answering machines. Careful listeners discover it's only a recording of Heston hawking insurance, sent to thousands of phones. One senior complained of letters selling supplementary Medicare insurance that looked like it had been sent from the federal government itself, when the letters were really from an insurance company.

Recently, a Leisure World resident lost $17,000 through a phony lottery scheme in which she was told she had won $800,000, Burchman said. But to get the money, the perpetrators asked her for increasingly steep amounts of cash for bonded couriers, travel plans and other phony fees.

Burchman, who used to work in public affairs and intergovernmental relations for the federal government, started researching scams several years ago when a friend told him about being taken by a broker selling stocks. The friend bought a few shares, and the price soared. So he sunk more money into them, and the price plummeted. It turned out that the broker was part of the company for which the stock was being sold and was helping manipulate the price.

In researching that case, Burchman came across many similar instances. He began digging even deeper into a variety of scams, and in 1997 he started VOTE. The group tries to get the word out about problems and scams seniors have encountered.

"People say, 'Hey, that happened to me, I remember that.' And that's the trick, to get people to remember this stuff," he said. "As we get older, it's important to hear things over and over again because we start to lose some of the things we had stored in our memories."

Membership in VOTE costs $3 a year, a fee that helps Burchman and others in his group defray the cost of research, copying and mailing. There is no newsletter, but Burchman pens a regular column about scams and crime for Leisure World's newspaper. That column also runs in several other papers as far away as Oregon and Florida. In addition, he writes a question-and-answer column about specific instances of fraud for the Senior Beacon, a monthly newspaper for Washington-area senior citizens.

He also speaks to a variety of groups throughout Maryland and Virginia. To help take VOTE's message beyond Leisure World's 8,000 residents, Fran Scheinberg, 80, helped arrange a recent talk by Burchman for seniors at the Jewish Community Center in Rockville.

Scheinberg, who also lives in Leisure World, said she had entered dozens of contests, always sending money to buy a trinket or a magazine in hopes it would help her odds. She never won a cent and now wants to help others from being blinded by the thought of winning millions.

VOTE meets monthly in Leisure World's community building. Last month, Montgomery County Police Chief Charles Moose spoke to the group about crime against seniors in the county.

From January through October 2000, seniors in the county reported 60 robberies, 187 burglaries and 228 car thefts, according to the Montgomery County Police Department. Some of these crimes involved scams, but they were not broken out as a separate category.

Seniors are more often prey for con artists and thieves because their eyesight and hearing are not as acute and because they are often slower and more frail, said David Baker, a crime prevention specialist with the Montgomery Police Department's Community Outreach section.

"When criminals watch people, they see about one in 10 with a big neon sign over their heads saying, 'You are a victim,' " Baker said. "Seniors are particularly vulnerable, and the sign blinks, 'Victim, victim, victim, come and get me.' "

Baker gives presentations on crime prevention to senior groups across the county, including one last year for VOTE. His office also provides security surveys of homes to pinpoint vulnerabilities.

Seniors are particularly targeted for home repair scams, in which the con artist will offer to repair their roofs or put on new siding at a discounted rate, Baker said. However, payment is required upfront and then the work is never performed.

In addition to warning seniors about home repair and other scams, VOTE has successfully lobbied for several changes to state law in the past few years. One law now forces car insurance companies to more clearly disclose whether used parts are acceptable for repairs in insurance claims. Another allows telemarketers to be recorded on the phone without permission.

VOTE offers tips to avoid scams on its Web site at www.geocities.com/heartland/acres/8777/vote.html. Among them: Be suspicious about extraordinary promises of high monetary returns or a "bargain" no one else can match. Check with police, the Better Business Bureau or the postmaster's office to see whether there are any complaints pending against a company. If telemarketers won't identify themselves, hang up. Don't enter contests, a sure-fire way to get added to more direct-mail lists.

For Wallace, the need for constant vigilance can be frustrating.
"Years ago, you never thought to ask if someone was trying to scam you," she said. "You just don't know whom to trust. Everything you do, you have to check and double-check, and then you still might not be sure if it's legitimate. But I do think the more you can protect yourself, the better off you'll be."

For more information about VOTE, call 301-598-6227. 

                 © 2001 The Washington Post Company