Tennessee’s seniors are precious, so precautions must be taken to protect them from scams targeting seniors.
It’s not just wealthy seniors who are targeted. Thieves are lowly enough to rob and abuse older persons. Sometimes the perpetrators are even family members.
How do Jackson’s seniors defend themselves? Because the danger is a senior uninformed of the risks, the solution is knowledge and a healthy skepticism of anything that sounds too good to be true. Financial decisions forced under pressure may also be the result of a scam.
NCOA, the National Council on Aging, identified just a few of the scams targeting seniors:
Health Care Fraud: Designed to trick the senior into providing his or her personal information, then use that information to bill Medicare and pocket the money. Also, be wary of makeshift mobile clinics that provide no actual service and counterfeit prescription drugs sold online.
Funeral Scams: Be skeptical of anyone who claims a deceased loved one owes them money or any funeral home that attempts to add unnecessary charges to the bill.
Telemarketing: Deceiving you over the phone can be more effective than holding you at knifepoint because there’s little of a paper trail. Fake charities are created after disasters or strangers claim a family member needs cash they’ve generously agreed to solicit on their behalf.
Internet Fraud: Just because you get an email from a trusted organization, it isn’t necessarily legitimate because logos can easily be copied and fake web pages created. If you click on the link in an unsolicited email rather than typing in the web address of the trusted website yourself, you can easily be tricked.
Investment Schemes: Those who’ve accumulated and seek to safeguard their retirement savings may be targeted by pyramid schemes that eventually collapse. You should not put your money into anything risky or too complicated to understand, trusting someone else to look out for your best interest.
These are just a few of the scams targeting Jackson, Tennessee seniors. As the late President Reagan said, trust but verify.