BELFAST, Maine — A 91-year-old woman in Belfast doesn’t quite remember how she got drawn into a telephone relationship with a stranger who recently drained her bank account of about $25,000 — the great majority of her retirement savings. She thought he might have said he would invest the money for her, but she wasn’t sure.
What she remembered more clearly is the happiness his calls brought her.
He seemed young. He said he lived in Lincolnville, just down the road.
He told her he would visit her. He loved her.
“He called me honey,” she said, with a sad smile during an interview in her modest home. “He kept calling me sweet names. It was almost like he was going to marry me or something. I didn’t really believe it — I’m not quite that stupid.”
Still, late last December, following the caller’s instructions, she mailed a personal check for $25,000 to an address in California. The check didn’t clear because she didn’t have quite enough to cover it in her bank account. The scammer called her back and told her she needed to write another check, for a smaller amount.
The second check she wrote was for the same amount as the first, but somehow, this time, the local bank it was drawn on — Bangor Savings Bank — processed the draft that emptied her account.
Her family, who asked that they not be identified in this story, said their mother, who suffers from mild dementia, understands she was deceived. Still, according to her oldest daughter, she has not accepted the full brutality of the situation.
“She says they’re nice people and she doesn’t want them to get in any trouble,” the daughter said.
The Belfast woman’s experience is devastating, to her and to her family. But it is far from unusual.
Maine Attorney General Janet Mills said about 2,500 Mainers contacted her office to report being scammed last year. That’s just the tip of the iceberg.
“You can bet your boots there are thousands more out there” that go unreported, even to local police, Mills said.
In part, that’s because it is next to impossible to identify, apprehend and prosecute scammers, who often run their operations from other countries using assumed identities and a complicated network of equally invisible partners.
“These people are completely anonymous,” Mills said.
In addition to the feeling of futility in reporting scams, there is shame.
“People are so embarrassed to admit they’ve been taken in,” Mills said, “but even the most intelligent, well-educated people fall prey to these scams.”
The ‘grandparent scam’
In the Bangor area, another woman, now 90, has had several encounters with would-be scammers in recent years but has managed to avoid losing any money.
The first was when a stranger going door-to-door insistently badgered her and her aging husband to pay him for work he hadn’t done. Intimidated, they wrote him a check; but she also wrote down his license plate number and contacted the local police. The man, who had a record of swindling elderly homeowners, was arrested and ordered to return their money.
The second incident happened about five years ago, shortly after her husband died. An enthusiastic young caller announced she had won the Canadian Sweepstakes.
“I told him I couldn’t have won because I didn’t buy a ticket,” the woman said. “He said, ‘Oh, we do it different here in Canada.’ Then he said I needed to send him $300 to pay the taxes on my winnings. That’s when I hung up.” After that, the scammer called her several times per day for weeks, demanding money to secure her prize. His tone changed dramatically over time.
“At the end, he was harassing me and calling me stupid,” she recalled. Shaken, she threatened to report him to the Office of the Maine Attorney General, and the calls stopped. In retrospect, she says, she should never even have answered his calls.
But the most unnerving episode was yet to come.
One morning, about four years ago, she answered a call from an official-sounding man.
“He said, ‘I’m calling about your grandson; he’s here at the jail,’” she recalled. The man said her grandson, who was 15 at the time and attending a boarding school in Connecticut, had been picked up at the scene of a crash while driving across the state line into New York.
“I said, ‘It can’t be Robbie; he doesn’t have a license.’ So then they knew his name,” she recalled, chagrined. The caller said it would take $2,500 to pay Robbie’s fine.
“Then they put this kid on the phone,” she said. “He was crying hysterically. He said, ‘Nana, please don’t tell my dad, please don’t tell my mom. I’m so ashamed. I’m afraid I’ll lose my scholarship.’” She was utterly convinced the distraught child was indeed her dear grandson. For one thing, he had used her pet name: Nana.
Then a “lawyer” came on the line and explained how to wire the money to the jail from the local Wal-Mart. It had to be done at 5 p.m. that day, he said, so she had time to arrange her finances. The scammers called back several times during the day, complete with the crying child, to be sure she was following through. And she was, fervently.
But when she asked her daughter, the boy’s aunt, for a ride to Wal-Mart to wire the money, the story unraveled quickly. The daughter was suspicious. A call to county law enforcement in Connecticut determined there had been no accident at the New York border. No juveniles were being held. Another call revealed that Robbie was, in fact, safely in study hall at his school, innocent of all the drama.
The grandmother is still appalled to think she was so gullible. Her daughter is more forgiving.
“When they’re talking about your kids or your grandkids, it goes right to your primal brain,” she said. She thinks the scammers gleaned personal information about the family from reading her father’s obituary.
Identifying scams and scammers
The Federal Trade Commission maintains a long list of popular and emerging scams. It’s a sobering read, confirming that the imagination of scammers is boundless, and their conscience nonexistent.
If it’s not a beloved grandchild facing jail, it’s a sick friend stranded without cash in a foreign country. If it’s not the Canadian Sweepstakes, it’s the Jamaican Lottery. Or the wealthy Nigerian who needs help setting up an American bank account so he can transfer millions out of his country. Or a bogus win of the Publishers Clearinghouse Sweepstakes. Or, in the case of the Belfast woman, it’s a version of the cruel “sweetheart scam” that convinces a lonely senior to give away her money to a sweet-talking stranger.
Unsuspecting targets may be told they owe money to the IRS or the electric utility and must wire funds immediately to avoid harsh penalties. Or the caller needs bank account information, or a Social Security number, to deposit a Medicare refund. Scammers can send a scary-looking message to a personal computer insisting it has been infiltrated by malicious “spyware” — click on the link provided, and that’s when they actually install that spyware themselves, gaining access to personal and financial data.
Some official steps are being taken to intervene. Notably, banks are using technology to detect unusual activity in individual accounts and flag the attention of security experts and account holders. In addition, the Senior$afe program, developed by a coalition of Maine organizations and now a national model championed by Sen. Susan Collins in proposed legislation, seeks to train front-line bank tellers to watch for changes in personal behavior, banking habits or other indications that an elderly account-holder may be the victim of a scam.
A security official for Bangor Savings Bank, the institution that authorized the processing of the check that emptied the Belfast woman’s account, said in a statement this week that the bank employs “robust anti-fraud protocols and systems” to protect customers and the bank, including participation in the Senior$afe program.
“We cannot guarantee, however, that an individual will not become the victim of fraud,” he said.
He said the bank does not discuss its security protocols publicly, in order to avoid providing criminals with information they could use to get around safeguards. He also declined to comment on the case of the Belfast 91-year-old’s lost savings, citing “privacy laws, regulations and the nature of the banking business.”
Overall, everyone consulted for this story, including the families of the two women interviewed, said the best way to prevent being scammed is to be vigilant and skeptical. Use a caller identification system on your phone and don’t answer calls from numbers you don’t recognize. If you find yourself talking to a stranger about money matters, hang up immediately. If they call back, do not answer. Never give out personal information over the phone or in an email, including banking information or your Social Security number. Never wire money or send a check to anyone you don’t know. If someone calls to tell you you’ve won the lottery, you have not. Beware of official-looking deliveries that arrive via the U.S. Postal Service; they, too, may be fraudulent. If you’re the caretaker of an older relative, spouse or friend, keep a close eye on their finances and question them about unusual activity.
And do report scams and attempted scams to your local police and to the attorney general’s office. “We need to know what’s going on in Maine,” Mills said. “We’re seeing new twists on these scams every day.”
“Your bank, your government, the IRS, the police — they don’t do business that way. They will never call you on the phone and harass you for money,” said Mills. “On the other hand, scammers make millions of calls all day, every day. All they have to do is succeed with one person to make it worth their while.”
Contact the Consumer Protection Division of the Office of the Maine Attorney General by calling 1-800-436-2131 or emailing consumer.mediation@maine.gov.
