Question 

My father is in his 70’s and still working part time as an artist. Someone, supposedly famous, wants to commission him and the whole thing sounds very sketchy and like a scam.  

Dad is not very sophisticated when it comes to all of the scams out there. In fact, he rarely reads his email or uses the internet. He is just not of the generation that grew up with all of the gadgets we have today. Yet, one day he did read his email and saw this offer that seemed amazing.  

He is now in communication with this person who supposedly is going to pay him all sorts of money. The catch is there is some outlay on his part.  

Luckily, he shared his supposed windfall story with me, and I got in the middle of it.  

What I want to know is, how to I protect him and my mother when I live on the opposite coast? This is downright scary.  

Answer  

Now more than ever, all of us with living parents need to be close to them. Our technology is a blessing and a curse and has made it rather easy for people to make a living scamming hardworking people out of their money.  

The elderly are at the greatest risk for a variety of reasons. First, if they are in their 70’s, they did not have any technology growing up other than a phone with a rotary dial and a likely party line. They may have had a television that stopped broadcasting around 10PM. The internet has been around awhile now, though not everyone is as savvy as the youth of today when it comes to navigating.  

Now enter artificial intelligence, burner phones, photoshop, fake IP addresses, and a host of other ways to hide your identity. It is imperative that everyone be on guard to protect themselves and their assets. The odds of an attempt to take your money is very high.  

Here is where you come in. Everyone should be “circling the wagons” so to speak when it comes to their accounts and particularly for their parents, because they may have more assets than you. I cannot tell you how many people that I talk to whose parents have been scammed out of money, and sometimes the sums are very high.  

I strongly recommend a family meeting to discuss nothing other than fraud. I recommend printing out and brining to the meeting short summaries of scams you find on the internet. There are thousands to choose from. At your family meeting, pass the stories out.  

The second topic should be the steps you recommend for everyone to take to protect themselves from theft. I will devote my entire column next Friday to providing you a list of what are the most obvious steps to take.  

The takeaway for this week is for each family member to agree to a buddy system. Each person in your family needs a buddy to discuss calls, emails, texts, or even mail that is out of the ordinary. Promise each other that you will take no action on ANYTHING without taking to your buddy. Each of you needs to pick that buddy now and access them before any payment of any kind is made. It will be best if your buddy does not live with you or is not of your household. (We do not always listen to our spouses.) Your buddy will be your voice of reason and your protector. We all need this person. They do not need to be in your town every day. We are all a call or text away.  

Next week, we will talk about how to set up your parents to be as safe as possible with technology.