Top Scams Targeting Seniors

As many senior citizens spend their retirement traveling with family, pursuing second careers, or becoming more active in the community, con artists are creating devious schemes to prey on their accumulated wealth. Most recently, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, 59, said he almost fell for a financial scam. A fraudster posing as an Internal Revenue Service (IRS) agent called him and left a phone number for him to call back, but after he put the number into Google, he learned it was a well-known scam. He said the IRS has recorded 290,000 scam calls since October 2013. Michael Raanan, former IRS agent and president of Landmark Tax Group in California, says the IRS telephone scam is one of the most pervasive scams targeting seniors. He says senior citizens are receiving phone calls from scammers who purport to be IRS agents. They claim to be calling about unpaid back taxes and proceed to threaten the senior citizen with arrest, lawsuits, suspension of their driver’s license, and more. “This is the biggest phone scam the IRS has ever seen and has already netted over $5 million after hitting all 50 states and now Canada,” Raanan says.

Read about other big scams at Bankrate.

David Wingate is an elder law attorney practicing in Frederick and Montgomery Counties. David Wingate’s practice includes wills, powers of attorneys, trusts, asset protection and Medical assistance (Medicaid).