Telemarketing and mail fraud is nothing new, but it may surprise you to learn these scammers know exactly who they’re cheating out of their hard-earned money.

Donna White, Aging/Health Specialist, Elder Rights/Service Operations for the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services, Division of Aging and Adult Services, spoke Thursday at the Hamlet Senior Center and said the aging population is at the greatest risk of being scammed.

“As you age, you become more vulnerable,” White said.

White is a part of a team that created the Victim Assistance Program which is dedicated to helping victims of fraud get back on their feet by teaching them how to stand up to those scammers and say “No” to a deal that sounds too good to be true.

As part of this program White and her team are trying to train volunteers in all 100 counties of the state so that when elder fraud is reported, there’s a volunteer who can come in and help.

“The problem is scammers are out there, and if you haven’t already been scammed there’s a likelihood you will be,” White said.

White cited certain “Clearinghouses.”

“There’s no prize patrol, no balloons, no van — they’re all actors and the reason they haven’t been pulled in yet is because every once in a while they’ll give away some little prize like a Mickey Mouse watch ...” White said.

White said your information is sent to a massive clearinghouse where it’s plugged into a computer that shares your information with other operations.

In her presentation Thursday, White said scams are widely committed, seldom prosecuted, poorly understood and underreported. She said there’s a higher incidence of scams in the southeast than anywhere else because this is where the older population comes to retire.

White said many of the scammers in existence are never prosecuted because they live in Canada, Jamaica, Australia, and Spain, and those countries will not extradite people into the U.S. to be tried and possibly convicted.

“This program is the result of trying to catch the perpetrators and not being able to,” White said.

She said fraud cases are also underreported because seniors are not likely to tell their caretakers or children what they’ve done, if they’ve sent money to a scammer, because they don’t want to be thought foolish.

She said there are three main things that lead to seniors becoming victims of fraud, loneliness, memory loss or greed.

Loneliness doesn’t have to mean they live alone, but for some reason the person feels alone and a scammer can pick up on that and feed on it, making the victim feel as if they are their only friend.

Memory loss is another big problem and something scammers can pick up on and take advantage of.

And if someone has been a gambler all their life, or enjoyed the thrill of winning prizes, White said this is how they end up in the greed category.

White said victims that have lost more than $10,000, are repeatedly victimized and are 70 or older are often referred to as “super victims” and are the kind her program works with the most.

Often, she said, scammers will “reload” their victims, which means they will continuously take more and more money from the same victim.

“By the time we find a victim, they’ve been hit more than once,” White said.

White said the most common types of fraud are home repairs, telephone psychics, sweepstakes/lotteries, phony charities and government grants.

“Your first line of defense is to throw it away,” White said about the mail solicitations. “Don’t even open it.”

White said anytime you get a survey in the mail, over the phone, or at the mall or some other store, you’re giving your information to these information “clearinghouses” that use that information and screen that information to find the seniors and target them for their money-making scams.

“People seek out the seniors because they know they’re vulnerable,” she said.

White said there are two main types of perpetrators - really nice ones and ones that threaten their victims into submission. The really nice ones will befriend their victims until they think they’re their only friends. The threatening ones will bully their victims into giving them large sums of money.

Things White said everyone needs to remember include: If you get a call about a lottery or sweepstakes that you did not yourself purchase a ticket for, it’s a scam. Hang up the phone and walk away. If you get an e-mail from someone in Nigeria, China or other foreign nation and the spelling is off and they’re asking you to send them a certain amount of money and in exchange they’ll give you a bigger sum of money, it’s a scam, delete the e-mail. If you get a call and no one answers the first few seconds you pick up the phone, it’s a telemarketer, hang up.

Another things to keep in mind is local scammers. The most common are people who will drive through your neighborhood, stop at your home, offer to fix something for a certain fee with the promise they’ll come back the next day to do the work — those people never come back and now you’re out a couple hundred dollars.

If you get a request in the mail from a charity but are unsure if it’s legitimate or not, White said to call your local Better Business Bureau and find out.

White also said, a good way to protect your information is to shred old documents, and never put sensitive material in your home’s mailbox with the flag up, take it to the post office yourself or drop it off at a U.S. Post Office drop box, whichever is more convenient, because the flag on the mail box is an announcement letting potential scammers know there’s something to be had.

For more information on this Victims Assistance Program you can visit www.ncdhhs.gov or contact White at (919)733-0440 ext. 232 or e-mail her at donna.white@ncmail.net.

n Staff writer Eren Tataragasi can be reached at (910) 997-3111 ext. 19 or at etataragasi@yourdailyjournal.com.