Too many senior citizens are falling for crypto currency scams, according to 6th District Congressman Sean Casten.
At a roundtable discussion about senior citizen issues and concerns on April 13 at his offices in Lombard, Casten threw out some numbers.
“They are massively disproportionally affecting and targeting seniors,” Casten said of scammers. “The Iowa Attorney General found that 50% of all crypto transactions are fraudulent and 86% of the people who are being defrauded are over 60.”
He called it the “Wild West” and too many older people are becoming victims.
Two people at the roundtable said there are ways to try to curb the fraud.
Bernie Niewoehner of the Warrenville branch of NuMark Credit Union said that whether it’s crypto or any type of scam, there can be a few things done if seniors want to take out large sums of money.
“I know on the wire side of things, we do tend to stop a lot of potential wire fraud,” he said. “We did have a lady who claimed she was married to some actor out in California who is on a popular show on HBO.
“She said that she had to send him $15,000 for his homeowners insurance, otherwise the house won’t be protected.”
He asked if she had ever met the actor and she said no.
“We have stopped some of those,” Niewoehner said. “It is something we can do if we suspect it’s going to be fraud.”
Karina Vargas, a fraud specialist for the Countryside branch of NuMark, said that if people want to take money out, it’s their right. But she feels the credit union should educate the potential victims of what they are getting into and hopes other unions and banks will follow suit.
“We tell our tellers and people in the front line to try to have conversations with them,” Vargas said. “That’s as much as you can do.
“You can’t stop people from taking their money out but we can try to get them in their right mind and we try to have as much conversation as possible. If that’s not working, we try to take them into an office.”
She added that getting the seniors into a smaller setting like that helps them get a better handle of the situation.
The roundtable had plenty of doom and gloom for senior issues such as Social Security and insurance woes that they are facing.
When Casten asked if there was any positive news, Marla Fronczak of AgeGuide Northeastern Illinois came up with some.
“A good majority of those 770,000 older adults living in our eight-county region are driving so I don’t want to paint the picture that this is just this tremendous need for services,” she said.
“These people are still homeowners and they are still able to be active in their communities. They still want to be engaged in their communities.
“We do a lot of work around social connectedness programs and intergenerational programs and keeping people because we know the longevity trend is there.”
However, Fronczak said that they, too, should be shielded as much as possible from scammers.
“We have to keep them holding their wealth because we do not want people taking advantage of them,” she said. “The more education and the more opportunities to protect them is important because they are the greatest targets out there.
“We want to make sure they aren’t being taken advantage of.”