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Make sure before helping a 'relative'
The next time you get a call or an electronic message from a loved one in distress, make sure you know who you’re talking to.
There is a scam going around the country — and it’s made its way to Quincy — in which a con artist poses as a relative in an emergency situation in order to swindle money from an unsuspecting victim.
Here’s how it works, a relative (usually an elderly person) receives a telephone call from a “grandson” or “grandaughter” saying that they are in a desperate fix in another country like Canada. The “grandchild” asks the relative to wire money to help fix the problem.
In other versions, a con artist will pose as a victim of circumstance on a social networking site like Facebook and ask family and friends to send money right away to help out.
These con artists are good at what they do. They know how to push the buttons of people who only want to help out their loved ones. Sometimes they have done enough homework to know enough about the person they are impersonating so they are extremely convincing.
Of course, sometimes our loved ones do really get in a bind, so it would be important not to just automatically dismiss every call of this nature.
The AARP has offered tips to prevent falling victim to this kind of scam.
They include:
• If the caller says, “It’s yourgrandson,” ask, “Which one?” Most perpetrators will then hang up.
• Confirm your relative’s identity by saying you will return the call at his or her home or on his cellphone (but don’t ask the caller for it). If you don’t have the phone numbers, contact a trusted family member for them.
• Never provide your bank or credit card account numbers to any caller.
• Be wary of requests for money wires.
It’s sad when people take advantage of someone’s good nature, but with a little vigilence, you don’t have to be a victim.
:) commented, on March 14, 2010 at 5:32 p.m.:
You should also lock down your personal contact information and make it available only to trusted friends.
Many people play games on facebook and 'friend' people they barely know, which can leave their personal info exposed to potential scammers. By creating a list of people you actually know and trust, you can make it available to them using the custom setting on facebook.
So many people think nothing of posting their date of birth, home town, current town, names and ages of children, phone numbers, email addresses, and work information on their profile without making sure it's only exposed to the people you trust. Facebook isn't looking out for your best interests when it comes to privacy and protecting your personal information, so it's up to users to learn how to create friend lists and how to use them to secure as much info as you can.
The latest round of tweaking that Facebook did with security settings has exposed quite a bit of info about people that previously had their profiles set to 'friends only'. They changed the defaults on some things to 'friends of friends' to encourage sharing. I had my profile set to be unsearchable and 'friends only' and I found out that my Notes and some Pictures (usually your profile picture folder) were set to 'public'. It would be good to double check all of those. Currently I can see the entire wall of someone that I know doesn't like me. I am not sure they realize their security has changed to
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