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The caller sounded like Karen Jensen's grandson, Jake, embarrassed to be asking his grandma for money after he suffered a concussion and a hurt lip in a weekend car accident.
He apologized again and again, saying he was in Quebec, Canada, accompanying a friend to a relative's funeral. The car he had rented was damaged in the crash, he told Jensen, and he needed her to wire him $2,500 to take care of the bill because his insurance company wouldn't pay right away.
“Don't you want to call your dad?” Jensen asked him. No, he replied, he was too embarrassed. He asked that she not say anything to anyone about his predicament until he returned.
“He was very sweet to me over the phone — ‘Grandma this' and ‘Grandma that,'” said Jensen, who lives in Lincoln. “When I think about it, it just makes me irate.”
The caller wasn't Jensen's grandson, of course. It was a scammer who, except for an alert Walmart clerk, almost got Jensen's money on Monday morning.
“Jake” handed the phone to a man who told Jensen he was a police officer. The man assured her that her grandson would be fine, then directed her to send a MoneyGram to an address in Canada. Jensen then hurried to her bank, withdrew the money and drove to the Walmart in south Lincoln.
The Walmart employee asked Jensen about wanting to wire money to Canada and told her that she recently had tried, unsuccessfully, to talk another person out of doing the same thing. The worker then asked Jensen where Jake worked and called the office. She reached the real Jake and handed Jensen the phone. Jake assured Jensen that he was fine and that he had not been to Canada.
Jensen said Wednesday that she appreciated the Walmart worker's caring enough to say something. “I feel really stupid about this now,” she said, “but I would have (sent the money).”
Jim Hegarty, president and chief executive of the Omaha Better Business Bureau office, said bureau offices around the country have been reporting similar incidents. They refer to it as the “grandparent scam.”
“It's just another twist from the same old perpetrators who are trying to identify different ways to get individuals, particularly seniors, to wire money offshore,” Hegarty said.
“This is what they do professionally,” he said. “They make hundreds of these calls every single day, trying to reel one person in.”
The Better Business Bureau offers some tips to avoid falling for this scam:
1.Try to verify the caller's identity by asking personal questions that a stranger couldn't know, and don't fill in the blanks.
2.Do whatever is necessary to confirm the real relative's whereabouts. Call your grandchild's home, school or workplace.
3.Don't send money unless you have verified that your relative really is in trouble.
The grandparent scam isn't the only one showing up. An 87-year-old Omaha man called The World-Herald this week to warn people about two calls he had received. Both involved a caller who asked the man to meet him so he could pick up his contest winnings. The man figured it was a scam, he said, and hung up both times.
Hegarty said another scam involving time shares cost a Lincoln resident $7,000. Somehow, the caller knew the resident was trying to sell a time share. The caller said he had arranged for a sale but needed processing and escrow fees before the person could get the sale proceeds.
Hegarty said the Better Business Bureau has a dedicated phone line for senior citizens who think they may be the target of a scam. The phone number is 877-637-3334, and it is answered during normal business hours.
Contact the writer:
444-1109, bob.glissmann@owh.com
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