One day last week, I got a phone call from my mother-in-law. I know this sounds like the set-up for a joke, but it isn’t.
“Where are you?” she practically shouted. A strange question, in that she phoned me at my home. Then she asked me, in an even more panicky tone, where my wife/her daughter was. She was out grocery shopping ($1.49 day at Save On; check it out), I told her.
“She called me,” she screamed. “She’s been in an accident and she’s hurt!” Now, it was my turn to panic. How could that be? Why didn’t she just phone me? Gripped by a mild panic, I didn’t ask any questions.
I told my mother-in-law that I would call my wife’s cell, and get back to her. I did, but she didn’t answer. Now, I was really concerned. She was only about three minutes away, so I hopped in my car, fearing I would find her car wreckage on the way to Save On. Arriving at the store, I immediately saw her car, undamaged. Inside the store, I found her, unharmed and blissfully unaware of the mini-drama surrounding her.
It was, of course, a scam. (I didn’t know that the scammer had told my mother-in-law to wait for a call from a lawyer. When the “lawyer” called, my father-in-law asked for this phone number, and the “lawyer” immediately hung up.)
To be honest, I was angry at my mother-in-law for falling for the scam. I was even angrier at myself for not asking more questions. But I was angriest at the human scum who prey on trusting elderly.
According to data reported by the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre, more than 46,000 Canadians were victims of scams in 2022, losing $417 million to fraud. And that was just the reported scams.
Phone scams have become so ubiquitous that many of us have just given up on answering calls from numbers we don’t know. Internet scams are even more common; anyone who is online gets dozens, even hundreds, of scam attempts every year.
Most scams are obvious, even hilarious in a sad sort of way. But many prey on the elderly or the lonely. The grandparents scam convinces a trusting senior that their grandchild is in trouble, and needs money. Romance scams, victimizing people looking for love, seem painfully obvious to an outside observer, but they still work.
You, dear reader, may be thinking that you are much too savvy to fall for a phone or online scam. Hey, so am I. But do yourself a favour and read this story from New York magazine headlined “The Day I Put $50,000 in a Shoe Box and Handed It to a Stranger ”, written by a personal finance journalist. This educated, married, successful, not old woman is the last person you would think would fall for a scam. But as the headline says, she did. Boy, did she.
The bottom line is, if you don’t know the number, don’t answer, and be very suspicious of unsolicited emails or texts. If the message asks or demands that you send money immediately, it is most certainly a scam.
And remember these three little words – trust no one.
In This Corner 