Sadly it is very common. Some scammers use very specific info, like family names. I don't know here they get the info. Facebook perhaps?

I frequent another web site and the topic comes up every few months.

Someone called my 81 yo Dad. When he answered the phone, the girl caller said "Grandpa?". He knew something was up because my kids call him an unusual name. He let her talk for a bit and she told home a tale of woe. He finally said "You should be ashamed of yourself" and he hung up on her.

What is wrong with people?

I'm glad he didn't fall for it. With our elderly population (Florida) our local media often do stories about this kind of scamming. Sadly, many fall for it.

Here's one story on how the scam works. Warn the elderly in your life!

ML

The caller knew the names of the grandson, grandfather and father.

Yes. it's so awful. You wonder if these people have grandparents! Sheesh.

I also wonder how they get bail money in a way that is not traceable, when they "succeed" in this scam. What do I know.

This happened to my father in the last year or so. Luckily he also asked a couple of questions that the caller couldn't really answer. I think they wanted the money sent by wire transfer to a number the "police" would provide.

Disgusting low-life thugs preying on the elderly! I too am glad your FIL didn't fall for it. My FIL was almost suckered in by a caller who claimed that UPS was going to deliver a gift card to his door, if he would provide certain information. At first, FIL was going along with all of this, but when he learned it was a scam, he continued to string the caller along just to "mess with him." This went on over the course of about two weeks! When my DH found out about this, he was furious -- not only that his dad was almost scammed, but that his dad didn't seem to give any thought to the fact that he could have been playing a very dangerous game. I mean, the caller knew where FIL lived. People have been killed for less, I'm sure. :-(

Good for you Annie!

We've been inundated by calls from the IRS for the last week, telling us our arrest is imminent! Act fast! This is urgent! But our callers have all been obvious digital electronic voices, not living humans or even human taped voices. The calls all have different numbers. We answer them because our dtr lives overseas and her calls come from unrecognizable numbers, too.

They never stop thinking of ways to scam.

*Sheesh.

I worry about things like this w/ Facebook making it so easy to get so much private info about everyone.

It's also an issue when it comes to the bank security questions designed to prevent unauthorized account access. I had to sign into an investment account for my husband the other day while he was at work and it asked me a security question about his sibling's middle name that I didn't know. It took about 3 seconds for me to find that on Facebook.... and any thief could easily have done the same thing (mom's maiden name would be pretty easy too, just look for an uncle or brother on Facebook.) It made me think more carefully about what I'm choosing for my security questions (and passwords)...

My MIL got the same call a year or so ago, supposedly from our youngest son but the tip off was that he called her Gramma - my boys never call her that. But still she wasn't 100% sure, kept him talking asking him questions and eventually he answered something blatantly wrong and she hung up. Then called me immediately just to be sure!! Everybody has to be so careful now. You can't let your guard down anywhere.

Dont forget Adam (with a heavy Indian accent) who calls from Microsoft" and says "there's something wrong with your computer" ...My son, a computer science major got this call on his cell phone and said "Thanks, i think I can handle it!" LOL
BUT some seniors have given over access to their computers and they ask for a ransom to get information back, etc.

It's a sad, sad world when people have to scam poor innocent people to make a buck!

Another scam I saw in person was this: an older gentleman was in line ahead of us at the bank, and was withdrawing a few hundred dollars. He told the teller he had gotten a call telling him he'd missed a jury duty date and had to pay a fine by buying a Visa card for $nn and sending it or something. I caught the teller's eye and looked suspicious and shook my head, she asked the fellow some more questions and tried to explain the suspicious nature of it all, but he blithely went on about how silly it was to lose or forget the jury notice, and left.

The teller and I chatted and worried...

He went on to the drugstore, and the clerk told him it was all a known scam in the area.

Next time I was in the bank I asked the teller about it, and she said he came back in to redeposit the cash and tell her it was indeed a scam. I've since known other people who have received that "scam"!

beagles - wow, what a good warning about what's available on Facebook.

We have warned my mom about that same scam and have tried to reinforce that if any of her grandchildren were in trouble they would phone their parents (and they would) and not her. I just hope she understands and remembers that.

My elderly ex received the same type of phone call from a scammer earlier this year. Fortunately, he had the wits to email me first to check to make sure that the "grandson wasn’t really stuck in jail in a far away state” - before sending any money. It irritates me soon much that these scammers take advantage of our elderly. My elderly aunt gave away thousands of dollars last year due to this type of scamming, and it was money she needed for her retirement.

My mother got one of these calls a few years ago. I believe she strung him along for a few minutes and then told him he had picked the wrong person. She has no grandsons!

Wow, that is terrible. I'm glad your FIL didn't fall for it.

My sister told me about a similar call she had awhile back. I can't remember all the details now, but it was supposedly one of her step grand daughters that was in Cali, she lives in another state and the grand daughter lives in yet another state. She too asked the caller some questions about family because she didn't think it sounded like her, nor had she heard she was going to be away from home. The girl got some right and some she either ignored or avoided answering.
A similar thing happened to me on facebook with someone that had the same name as my oldest and bestes friend that we'd lost touch because of my various moves. We were chatting via fb and what I thought at first was catching up. A few minutes into the chat I didn't feel right. I knew my friend and though it had been a couple decades since we'd seen each other, I just knew it wasn't her, so I asked some questions about her siblings and hubby. She made things up about an accident that killed her brother and hubby, that could have been real, for all I knew, but I knew if that happened some of my family back home would have recognized the names in the paper and told me. I asked where and when it happened and got vague answers about both, when I asked which state, she refused to answer getting mad saying she didn't want to talk about it. I stopped the chat and deleted her as a friend on fb and got an email through fb asking why I deleted her. I didn't answer.
I am now back in touch with the real bestest friend and she was shocked what happened.
I'm so glad your FIL is a wise chap and didn't go for it. There's some pretty sick people out there.

My late MIL got a call many years ago telling her that she had won one of three prizes. I recall one was a car, one was a diamond ring, and forget the 3rd. 'All she had to do' was send money via FedEx, a good amount, for 'processing fees'. I didn't hear about it til later, but thanks to a sharp FedEx counter person, who my MIL was talking with about her excitement over the 'prize', my MIL was talked out of sending the money, and finally was convinced it was a scam.

We asked her and my late FIL to please let us know if anyone came along suggesting that they needed work done on their house, or of any 'winnings', before they wrote any checks or sent any money to anyone. Especially if they hadn't entered any contests...

They are out there in so many forms taking advantage of the elderly. My elderly MIL fell for one involving telephone line protection insurance that she thought would do repairs on her lines inside and out her home if she had problems. She bragged about having it for years but never used the service. When my husband finally took control of her money, he found out it was a yearly fee for a cheap phone. And in the end, he had to send them money to end the service because she no longer had the original cheap phone to send back to them.

We would find letters from charities claiming she had agreed over the phone to donate money and asking that she call them back to arrange payment. She was hard-of-hearing for so many years, I can't imagine how those initial phone conversations went. Fortunately, it looks like she never sent them money.

Whenever I hear complaints about too much government regulation and the advantages of libertarian free markets, I think of the scammers preying on people like my MIL.

Is it really just the elderly who get duped? I've known people in their forties and fifties who've fallen for scams. Like the guy down the street - a dentist, for petes sake! (but secretly I’ve always thought he's an idiot, and even more so now both because he fell for it and also because he told me about it!) - who thought he was going to have his blacktop driveway repaired "for next to nothing" because a guy in a truck caught him outside and told him he had a lot of leftover blacktop from another job and would do the whole driveway for two hundred bucks! Neighbor handed over fifty bucks for the down payment so the guy could buy his crew lunch, the guy in the truck left "to get the stuff. Be back in a few minutes with my crew, Buddy." You know the rest.

I know this isn't a phone scam, but if you're a crook, there's more than one way to get the job done. I also love it when a truck stops in the neighborhood with leftover prime beef! The restaurant couldn't use it! I'll let you have it for a song!

I just don't answer the phone unless I know who it is.

True, Sheesh.

Easy enough if you can recognize a lot of numbers, i guess. What would you do if your dtr lived overseas, like mine does? Her calls come in on unrecognizable numbers, just like the scammers do. We Skype regularly, but the only way to do it is if she calls first, or we call her, to set it up. We answer all calls with funny numbers and just hang up when it isn't dtr.

*Sheesh

Our town has had a series of burglaries that target the elderly. Someone parks in front of a house and a guy in a 'utility uniform' gets out and rings the bell. He then informs the elderly resident that the Electric company will be out in a week or two to prune trees or shrubs from the right of way. He then asks the resident to walk over to the area so that he can show them which trees will be pruned. While the resident is occupied someone else enters the house and takes the valuables.

So far no one has been hurt but unfortunately there have been encounters between the thieves and someone who remained in the home.

My father lived with us for 4 years after my Mother died and he would have fallen for just about any scam artist. Door to door solicitation is not permitted here (except for Girl Scouts etc.) and I came home one day to find my Dad on the front porch talking to a 'contractor' who was putting a roof on a house up the street and was offering all the home owners in the area a discount since he was working in the area.

I don't answer any phone calls on either home or cell if I don't recognize the number. I figure if it's important they'll leave a message. We have an answering machine on the landline in the library so I can screen calls when I'm home. I pick up when it's someone I need to talk to.
We also have a service where anyone calling our landline for the first time gets a message stating we do not accept certain kinds of calls. If they are not that kind of call they have to do something. Not sure what it is anymore. Maybe hang up and click a few keys before calling back. I know that's happened to me before when using our land line because our home phone is private unlisted.

It's even worse when the scammer comes to your door~this happened near my neighborhood last summer. It was supposedly a large, young-ish, black woman who would come to the door, ask about something(can't remember!)and when an elderly woman would answer the door, she would shove them back inside beating them up enough to scare them, and steal whatever she could carry from the home, usually money and jewelry. A hand drawn picture was posted on our neighborhood website and there was never another incident, and never heard if she was caught.

I never answer the door w/o my dog by my side with my hand on his collar. He's a 'cattle dog', sort of looks like a Dingo, and have had people reach out to pet him as i'm saying, 'i wouldn't do that!' Behind all this 'hooey' my boy is as gentle as a butterfly, and never even growls nor has ever bitten anyone. However, he does have a fierce bark, and doesn't hesitate to use it. And his slight resemblance to a bit pull doesn't hurt either!

But . . . I have a "home" phone number which I give out to stores and official type people and is basically a message phone; but my cell phone is the one I give to people I actually know. I also sometimes use a Google Voice phone number (completely free), which sends a transcripted message to my email. There's little to no overlap, and I never get scam phone calls. Or if I do, they don't leave a message.

A woman I work with was getting the phone calls from the "IRS" saying that she and her husband were going to be arrested for all sorts of federal crimes because of tax evasion. She is from the former Soviet Union so she asked me to talk to the contact person to try and see if I could interpret what she was saying and it was this long-winded list of charges and penalties read off by some woman obviously from India and in a noisy telephone center of some sort.

I asked some questions based upon some familiarity as to how the IRS works and was told that the case was "beyond that point" because of complete non compliance by my co-worker and her husband. (Although she said this letter was the first contact).

I said "Well the problem here is that English is not my coworkers first language so do you have anyone there who is Bi-Lingual, particularly in Russian?"

No, she said immediately, there is no one here that is bilingual. And I said that this was hard to believe, and she asked why.

And I said "Because English is obviously not your first language, you aren't speaking Standard unaccented American English, you are obviously from the Indian subcontinent originally.'

And she said "Well there is no one here bilingual in Russian"

So I said "Okay well, her Tax attorney who is on vacation will have to contact you when he returns because he will have a better grasp of what's going on."

What a terrible thing to try and do to someone! We, thankfully, don't get many scam calls these days but when DD was still in high school, she would either bang the phone receiver down on the counter again and again, or blow a loud whistle into the phone. We had to put a stop to the banging, though, as we were afraid she' eventually break the receiver. Two weeks ago, at 8AM on a Saturday, DH got our first scam call in many months. The caller, with Caribbean accent and talking very fast, informed DH that he had just won a "very large prize" in a contest "because you always pay your bills on time". LOL, that was a new one! DH informed him as to where he could put that prize and hung up.

I try not to pick up numbers I don't recognize, but once it was a dr's office reminding us of an appointment.

Another time, we were getting all these robo calls which I ignored...until I got a letter in the mail saying I owed major bucks to JCPenney because of an unpaid bill. So finally I called them to find out that, for some unknown reason, the first bill was returned as undeliverable, and instead of sending a second statement, they just turned it over to collections and started adding fees. Took me awhile to straighten out, and I suggested they do better with contacting people than a robocall telling me to call an 800 number.

But poor MIL was blind and a woman came to the door saying she was with the Lighthouse organization. My MIL saw her in, then she asked for a glass of water...proceeded to steal a bunch of jewelry from her and then left. How bad do you have to be to rip off the blind???

My dear old aunt was in the early stages of alzheimers and was busy filling out all the credit card offers she was receiving as she thought they were required forms she had to mail back!

Hell has a special place for people who prey on the elderly, children and animals.

Mtn, your FIL was fast-thinking and asked good questions. Pets' names, grammar schools...there are lots of questions that are easy for the real person to answer and would trip up a scammer.

I also get a persistent call from the guy in India who calls about my Windows machine. Nevermind that I got rid of Windows years ago. I lie and I tell him I don't have a computer anymore, got rid of the damn thing. He then starts the spiel over, word for word.

Annie, that is horrific about your MIL!

Pattycakes, how scary.

A few years ago I canvassed door to door to get out the vote for a certain Presidential candidate. There would be two cars in the driveway, you could smell dinner cooking and hear the TV, but people did not answer the door. And I'm not even (too) scary looking. I guess answering the door is from another era if you think about it; I mean with cell phones who doesn't call first anymore?

ahem; who calls anymore? text is where it's at

"I also get a persistent call from the guy in India who calls about my Windows machine. Nevermind that I got rid of Windows years ago. I lie and I tell him I don't have a computer anymore, got rid of the damn thing. He then starts the spiel over, word for word."

When I receive these calls, I tell whoever the caller is to "hang on, I need to boot up my computer". I put the phone down and don't pick it back up for a very long time.

ML

My DD helps me at the shop from time to time. One day she was taking her lunch at her desk and surfing the web. Her computer locked up, a picture of her sitting at the desk flashed on the screen, and there was a message on it that said the FBI had taken over her computer because she was on a porn site. It would only unlock after she paid a couple thousand dollar fine. We closed the laptop, unplugged it and I called my guy who does my IT work. He came in the next day. He doubted that a picture of her was on the screen but I saw it too. Anyway he cleaned it up and said that many people fall for that scam because they do visit those sites. It is scary to think that lurkers can take over our computers. We covered the camera eye with black electrical tape after that happened.

My hardwired computers that are on our server only get used for my business software. All internet searches are done on a laptop so each office and the counter has a desktop and a laptop so we don't infect our critical information.

MtnRwdux, that would've happened to you at my house. I never ever answer the door to strangers. I don't care what you look like. If it's daylight, I may go to the door, which is glass, with my 100 lb barking black lab, to see who it is and if I don't know them, I tell them I don't open the door to strangers so if they have something they want to tell me, they can leave literature at the door. Nothing irritates me more than someone coming uninvited to my door at dinner hour.

Coincidentally, just this evening I saw someone get scammed right in front of our grocery store! As I was leaving, I saw a man b/w 40-50 yrs old with wallet in hand talking with a young girl who appeared to be in her 20s. She was dressed "nicely" in loose cotton shirt with long summery cotton skirt, blond hair in a loose bun. I didn't think much of it as I passed by them and then noticed a guy in an unrecognizable uniform heading toward us, about 50 ft away. I thought he was just going shopping, but then I hear him suddenly yell, "you need to leave the property immediately. You are not allowed here. Get out of here now!" She kind of took off and the man was standing there bewildered. It hit me that she must pave given him a sob story needing money. I've never seen security there before but wonder if this has been a problem lately so they hired someone. Odd.

Two,summers ago, I was approached by a man and his son outside a hotel in NJ. I had just checked in and went out to the car to get a few things. We were there for a soccer tournament so,the area was unfamiliar. He gave me some song and dance about needing a few dollars for gas, but I've heard about these kind of scammers before so I politely refused. I then went back inside and reported to hotel staff.

My elderly parents got the IRS scam call. They are both totally "with it" and my mother had a nice argument with a guy with a strong Indian accent. She basically told him to go ahead and send the cops..she wasn't worried about getting arrested. I do worry as they age that they might not be so smart.

Violet, We have elderly relatives who don't text, but we don't know a soul of any age without a cellphone anymore.

4kids4us, I get it. It was the first time I had ever gone door to door for anything. I think it is generally an ineffective approach; if asked to do it again I would have declined. We held fundraisers and such instead.

Neither my mother nor I have cell phones. I don't need one. Landline works just fine and I refuse to pay whatever a cell phone would cost per month.

Blfenton, a lot of people say that about the landline, and just have the cell.

We have a landline only for redundancy in emergencies. But I do not even know the number (we only got it 4 yrs ago and never use it). Sometimes when it rings, and it's the wrong number, people will say, well, what number is this, and I have to admit ,sheepishly, "I don't know"!

Holly-Kay, my hubby and son think I'm nuts because I cover the camera on my laptop when I'm not using it.

Last year, my sister (who lives in NJ) received a phone call from someone looking for me, using my maiden name. I live in TX and haven't used my maiden name for 18 years. They assumed my sister was me (they also had her address) and said I had a day to wire $300 for a past debt or the sheriff would come and arrest me. She called me frantic that the cops were going to show up and I had to reassure her that it was a scam call. They called her everyday for a week. The thing is, we have no idea how they connected my name to her phone and address.

Mtn, after rereading what I posted, I hope I didn't come across as harsh! I know many times the people coming to my door are volunteers or teens trying to support themselves. But in this day and age, it bothers me that volunteers and teens are still going door to door. While I'm not necessarily afraid of the stranger at my door (I'm sure you don't appear as a threat), I've always taught my kids not to ever open the door to someone they don't know, so I try to lead by example in this situation. And almost always, anyone coming to my door is either trying to sell me something I don't want, or someone canvassing for something I'm not interested in. My husband and I are registered in different political parties, so we get pummeled by both. Didn't mean to offend you...it's not easy I'm sure to go door to door like that!

4kids, Oh no, I was not offended at all! It was the first and last time I ever went door-to-door, and I considered it part of the experience of being heavily involved in a campaign. Luckily I also ended up being able to participate at a far,far higher level, in an area about which I have some expertise. But it was a good, if humbling, experience, and part of paying one's dues I suppose!

Neither my mother nor I have cell phones. I don't need one. Landline
works just fine and I refuse to pay whatever a cell phone would cost per
month.

We have cells, but I rarely use mine. I hate trying to have a conversation with someone on a cell. Why is the sound quality still so poor?

I don't answer calls when I don't know who it is either. But we rarely get "scam" or sales type phone calls. We have both our home and cell phones on the "do not call" list. Seems to work. Also, I do as mentioned above and use my cell number for friends, family, etc. and the home phone to others. Both have voice mail.