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Scams rising with an Aging Population

There are many scam news running around, but we found this one which shares the same concern as us here.

Aging population vulnerable to scams
"When parents are cheated out of their savings, burden often falls on adult children..."

And some shocking statistics again:

"The Federal Trade Commission estimates that 1.7 million seniors 65 and older (or 3.4 million people 55 and older) were fraud victims from mid-2002 to mid-2003..."
Full news here


The issue with an aging population that is susceptible to scams will only increase with time. The scammers may come from the internet, knock on the door (sales man), or even some new friends they meet at Church, supermarket, or just the gardens. I personally heard about some comments "close to scam" from my mom when she was approached by a legitimate bank for investment.

Elderly folks have a relatively large pool of money during their retirement. But most of them does not have any financial education to judge and decide if an investment plan is worth it. They don't even know what to ask, other than the non-guaranteed "XX%" returns over a several returns.

We are not going to fire-up a war with those investment bankers out there. However, we thought it would be nice if they could talk to the children of the elderly folks before asking the latter to sign on any forms --- just our opinion on ethics.

So there you go, they will be vulnerable to all sorts of scam, such as subscription scam, investment scam, Ponzi systems, and most of the scams we discussed in this site. In the example quoted in the news, someone lost $300,000 to some lottery scam. Like we wrote earlier, those of us who know will simply forget about it, but the scammers are targeting just 1 or 2 out of thousands.

We eserve the part about children to the last:
"burden often falls on adult children..."

I think its a great statement to scare us all (children) to always care and ensure that our elderly folks do not get scammed.




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