TERRE HAUTE —
Beware of the telephone caller who gives you one of the following messages:
“You have won the lottery!”
“You can purchase cheap property in another state!”
“You have won a new car!”
And maybe the most insulting scam of all scams …
“You have been the victim of a scam and we are calling to help you recover your losses.”
Several area residents have received just such a call, and some have fallen victim to scams that have amounted to hundreds of thousands of dollars in losses that will likely never be recovered.
On Wednesday, Vigo County Prosecutor Terry Modesitt, along with the Adult Protective Services Division and Terre Haute Police, called for awareness of these telemarketing and banking scams that have impacted multiple citizens.
In just three Wabash Valley cases, losses may be as much as $400,000.
Vigo County has four active cases of which authorities are aware. Modesitt estimates that several other people are also being scammed, but have not yet reported their losses, either due to embarrassment over being duped, or in denial that they are being scammed.
“It is sad, though, how many people fall victim to this,” Modesitt said, adding that the elderly are the main targets of the scams.
The caller gives a convincing sales pitch, he said, and requires the victim to send money to cover processing fees, taxes, shipping charges, or some other costs in order to receive the winnings. More calls requiring more money often come, but the prize is never received.
In the case of the “scam victim assistance” scam, the victim has already been identified as the successful target of a previous scam. The new caller will ask for fees, credit card and banking information needed to recover the previous losses. But it is just another scam to get new banking information and to pick up where the last scammer left off.
Jerry Hawk of Adult Protective Services said he has investigated one case in which an older man with a lot of property had the trees on his land logged in order to have money to send to a scammer.
“These people actually want to believe that this is true,” Hawk said of the victims. “These people want to see themselves as a winner.”
Hawk said he knows of a victim in Putnam County who confided in a police officer friend that she was about to receive a windfall. Even though the police officer recognized the scam, he had a hard time convincing the victim that she was not going to win the big prize.
“It is heart-wrenching to have these people sit there and tell you, ‘Mr. Hawk, I don’t want to lose my chance at the prize,’” he said.
In some cases, the victims have stopped paying their property taxes and their mortgages because they think they will receive the prize soon. Hawk said that could result in some of the victims also becoming homeless.
Adult Protective Services has actually sought a court-ordered guardianship of a victim’s finances to put a stop to the crime, Hawk said.
Anjie Hall of APS said the scams are often spotted by a bank that notices the withdrawals coming from an elderly person’s accounts.
Scott Funkhouser, a detective with the Terre Haute Police Department, said three of the cases he is now working on have come from the bank notifying police of an ongoing scam.
And, the telemarketing scams are not the only fraudulent schemes that have been seen locally.
Funkhouser also warned that many of the work-at-home offers seen on the Internet are really scams that request money to operate what turns out to be a fake at-home business.
Modesitt said he has seen the social networking site Facebook used by scammers as well. A popular fraud is to hack someone’s Facebook account and send out requests to that person’s friends list asking for money. The scammer will pretend to be the account holder and say that he has lost his wallet or been mugged in some foreign country and needs to have cash wired immediately so he can get home.
And in another scam targeting senior citizens, a caller pretends to be a friend of the victim’s grandchild. The caller will say the grandchild has been in a bad accident or arrested in a distant city and needs money to rent a car to come home, or pay a doctor bill, or get out of jail.
“The key thing is that they are soliciting you,” Modesitt said. “You’re not calling them. They are calling you out of the clear blue.”
In cases where the victims realize they have been scammed, the prosecutor said, they want to recover their money, but it can be impossible. The caller is usually not in the United States, and the money has gone overseas, making it unlikely to be recovered.
To avoid becoming a victim of telephone or banking scams and frauds, Modesitt recommends that everyone register their phone with the Indiana Do Not Call List at www.IndianaConsumer.com or call 1-888-834-9969.
Anyone who suspects they are being scammed should call their local police agency of the Indiana Attorney General’s Consumer Protection Division at 1-800-382-5516.
Lisa Trigg can be reached at (812) 231-4254 or lisa.trigg@tribstar.com.
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