Con artists intensify their telephone scam efforts in pandemic

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SILER CITY — Telephone scams have proliferated since the pandemic began, with overseas fraudsters targeting senior citizens.

At least one Chathamite has had enough.

Tom DeWitt is waging a personal vendetta against the remote con artists, and plans to lobby the General Assembly to make legislative changes that will more effectively deter the distant swindlers.

“I’m making this my priority in my life now, at least for the near future,” said DeWitt, of Siler City. “I know it will take a while to get anything done, but I’m going to try.”

DeWitt, 84, has no background in politics and policy. He moved to North Carolina from his native Washington, D.C., in 1972 to marry a Chatham girl. He made his career as a buyer for a chain of jewelry stores. But in the last year, it has become his mission to protect the elderly from rapacious scammers.

“It’s been much worse going on now for probably at least a year,” he said, “about since the pandemic’s start.”

DeWitt himself has never fallen for a telephone scam, though not for lack of scammers’ efforts.

“So far today I’ve only had five or six calls,” DeWitt said, laughing. “On a heavy day, 10 or 12.”

But he’s witnessed catastrophe among his peers when they unwittingly hand over sensitive personal information or send money directly to scammers posing as trustworthy government or company representatives.

“I have a good friend, he’s in his 90s,” DeWitt said. “And he lost his life savings, at least $50,000.”

The scam that got him was a time-tested favorite of telephone con artists: “This is Publishers Clearing House, you have won $20 million and a new Mercedes.”

“But they ask you to send money to cover shipping for the new car,” DeWitt said. “I think something like $1,500. (My friend) kept sending them the money — over and over he would send them money to ship it. ‘All you have to do is go to Walmart and get a money card,’ they say, and then when they call you, you give them the serial number on that card and they can go cash it.”

The Publishers Clearing House ruse is one of seven most commonly used ploys that DeWitt has identified from the many hundreds of scam calls he’s picked up (see sidebar). He likes to “play with the scammers,” DeWitt says, stringing them along — sometimes for half an hour or longer — before eventually revealing that he knows their ploy.

“When they realize I was toying with them they get mad,” he said. “They use all kinds of foul language.”

‘99.9% of the time it’s a scam’

Siler City Police Chief Mike Wagner has fielded dozens of calls in his career from seniors reporting telephone fraud.

“But it’s definitely been more prevalent in the last year,” he said.

And calls to the police department likely represent a minority of scam victims.

“A lot of times people don’t report to the police because they feel humiliated,” Wagner said, “and they don’t want to share with others that they became a victim.”

But having been fooled by a scammer should not embarrass senior citizens, he added. Scammers are professional criminals; they’re trained to capitalize on what frightens the elderly.

“They’re very, very good, and detailed in their approach,” Wagner said. “They make you believe what you’re doing is a good idea.”

In the most common con Wagner has seen, scammers impersonate an elderly person’s grandchild under duress.

“They say something like they’ve been arrested on drug charges,” he said, “and in order to post bail, you have to go to Best Buy or some big box store and buy thousands of dollars worth of gift cards.”

Other frequent scams include the Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes, which recently fooled one Siler City resident into handing over $11,000, Wagner said. There are also IRS impersonation scams, promises to perform house work after being paid upfront and fake alerts from law enforcement agencies.

“Which is a lie,” Wagner says. “No law enforcement identity does business over the phone like that.”

When unknown callers offer “things too good to be true,” or threaten legal retribution, Wagner’s advice is to call the police right away.

“We like to get ahead of this,” he said. “The best thing to do is to call us first and we will help vet whoever is calling you. I would say 99.9% of the time it’s a scam.”

‘They’re having success, or else they wouldn’t keep doing it’

DeWitt has compiled his top-seven scammer scripts into a pamphlet, which he shares with the area’s senior citizens, and which he is distributing through a regional network of churches.

The scams are easy to detect, DeWitt says. Almost always, the caller has a heavy accent and might speak broken English — indication they are likely in another country.

“I mean, I can hear that they’re in like a boiler room,” he said, “I hear all these different conversations going on.”

And invariably scammers will ask for sensitive personal information that legitimate companies and services never request out of the blue.

“They ask for my credit card information to pay some urgent, overdue bill,” DeWitt said. “Or they’ll say they’re from the IRS and they need my social security number or else my social security payments might stop, stuff like that.”

Almost everyone with a phone number has encountered the same schemes, but scammers seek out senior citizens who are often more easily deceived.

“So many elderly people have dementia, or the first beginning symptoms of dementia,” DeWitt said. “And elderly people tend to trust too much anyway. And then if they have dementia, they don’t even realize that they’re being ripped off.”

Many Chathamites match the victim profile that scam artists seek. One-third of all residents are aged 60 or above, according to 2018 data from the North Carolina Dept. of Health and Human Services, and the county’s populace is trending older. Under the Population and Income Information section of the county’s website, a demographics breakdown reports: “Like many counties, Chatham County is becoming ‘grayer,’ but doing so at a faster rate than surrounding counties.”

But the increased frequency of telephone scams is a problem of national consequence, and DeWitt is not alone in searching for retribution.

“It’s not just here,” he said. “It’s happening all over the country, and they’re having success, or else they wouldn’t keep doing it.”

Several reports in the last year corroborate DeWitt’s point.

The Federal Communications Commission warns on its website that “the COVID-19 pandemic has provided a new hook for robocall and text scammers, many specifically targeting older Americans’ concerns about health and finances.”

In an investigation at the end of last year, The New York Times found that many hundreds of thousands had been defrauded by telephone scammers using pandemic fear as leverage.

“I’m not shocked that scams have been on the rise,” Lucy Baker, a consumer defense associate at the United States Public Interest Research Group, said in the report. “Scammers love natural disasters, especially in this environment where everyone is vulnerable.”

In February, the Federal Trade Commission released a report tallying material losses due to fraud in 2020. More than $3.3 billion was reported stolen across a variety of scams. That represents an 83% uptick from 2019, when $1.8 billion was lost nationwide.

Besides increasing the frequency of their calls, scammers seem also to have improved their success ratios. More than one-third of those reporting fraud in 2020 had lost money, the FTC said, compared to 23% the year before.

The numbers are staggering, but they don’t surprise DeWitt.

“It’s everyday I’m getting these calls and I know people are falling for them,” he said. “... I know another fellow out here in the country that was scammed — they drained his bank account. There are lots of these stories and they have to stop.”

Distributing his pamphlet and educating senior citizens is an important first step, DeWitt says, but it’s only a temporary solution.

“The obvious answer is if we just had a law that prohibited these calls from coming into the country,” he said. “If they were calling from within the United States it would be pretty easy to prosecute them. But if they’re in India or Pakistan, they’re out of reach.”

The same obstacles that make it challenging to identify scammer locations of origin, though, make it difficult to intercept their calls, according to representatives from the N.C. General Assembly.

“We presently have state laws in place protecting against robocalls,” N.C. House Minority Leader Robert Reives II told the News + Record. “The problem seems to be the ability to enforce those laws.”

Still, he and other legislators are interested in protecting the state’s elderly residents who are most vulnerable to these attacks, Reives said.

“I am very happy to support and further strengthen our ability to identify fraud of the type that has been targeting seniors recently,” he said, “and I want to continue to investigate options to protect senior citizens who are being targeted at an ever increasing rate during this pandemic.”

Following the News + Record’s request for comment, Reives tasked a General Assembly staffer with researching options to strengthen state laws prohibiting scam calls, he said, and reached out to the Attorney General’s Office for a “formalized opinion” on the state’s legal options, though a response was not available by press time.

“There’s no downside to them getting something passed, some kind of regulation,” DeWitt said. “... We need to protect our older people from this kind of thing. We need to stop this rotten crime.”

Reporter D. Lars Dolder can be reached at dldolder@chathamnr.com and on Twitter @dldolder.