3 Ways To Protect Seniors From Phone Scams

Too often seniors are the victims of scams. Scammers target seniors because they think that seniors are going to be easy to con. And unfortunately in many cases they are. Seniors lost more than one billion dollars to scammers in 2020. The average senior who was a victim of a scam lost around $10,000. Seniors can report fraud after they are the victims of a scam and they may get their money back, but they may not. Seniors who still have landlines are especially vulnerable to being scammed, even though there are a lot of scams that moved online.

Phone Scams Are Still Popular

Even though many scammers have shifted to online scams these days phone scams are still a threat to seniors. Especially because many seniors still have landlines whose numbers may be on many phone lists. Cell phone scams also do happen. And sometimes seniors are scammed through text messages that ask them to send money electronically or phishing scams. But there are some things that seniors and their families can do to stop scammers like:

Have Someone Else Answer The Phone

If your senior parent has home care, the caregiver can answer the house phone if it rings. There’s a good chance that the home care provider will recognize a scam right away and can hang up the phone and block the number. Having someone besides your senior parent answer the phone will lower the chances that your senior loved one will get confused and talked into giving out their personal information to strangers. Having a home care provider screen calls for your senior loved one also means that calls that need to get through, like a call from a bank or a call from the doctor, will reach your senior parent.

Send Texts To Spam

If your senior parent is using a cell phone set up their phone so that only text from approved people on their contact list will show up in their texts. All other texts will be sent to an unknown senders folder where you or a home care provider can go through them and delete them. It’s easy to set up a filter to screen text messages. Another option is to turn off text messaging on your senior loved one’s phone. But many seniors like to text with their friends and family so you may not want to do that.

Sign Up For The Do Not Call Registry

It won’t stop all scam calls but signing up your senior parent’s phone number for the Do Not Call Registry can help cut down on the number of telemarketing calls that they receive. Both landline phone numbers and cell phone numbers can be entered onto the Do Not Call Registry. Once the numbers are on the registry companies that call people at home and make sales pitches for things like timeshares, vacations, car warranties, or services that your senior parent likely doesn’t need. However, you may still need to use a call blocker to stop scam calls.

Sources:
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/senior-citizens-lost-billion-scams-year-fbi/story?id=78356859
https://californiamobility.com/senior-citizen-scams-statistics/