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Muriel Heon, a resident of The Salvation Army's Ottawa Grace Manor, is all too familiar with this type of pitch from telemarketers looking to add her to their list of victims.

"About a year ago, when we all had phones in our rooms, there were a lot of suspicious calls," recalls Heon, 91.

Vivian Huband, 94, another Manor resident, also remembers the attempted scams.

Unfortunately, many seniors do fall victim to the thousands of scams swirling about.

"The elderly are more vulnerable (to scams) for many reasons," says Ormond Carnegi, who handles fraud complaints for Phone Busters. "Seniors are usually home, have more income and many are recent widows or widowers who are not used to doing finances. Seniors were raised to trust people and are more vulnerable because of it."

Phone scams alone have siphoned millions from seniors. These days, phones are the least of seniors' worries. In the past four months, more than $2 million has been stolen just in local debit card scams.

The Salvation Army and RCMP recently teamed up to educate seniors with demonstrations and information kiosks at the second annual fraud awareness day at Grace Manor.

SHRED ALL DOCUMENTS
Sarah Fabbro, with the RCMP's Merchants Against Financial Crime unit, had people hold fake bills to the light to demonstrate how to pick out a fraudulent note.

She also offered tips to protect people against credit card scams and identity theft.

Fabbro cautions people to shred all documents, such as phone bills and bank statements, before disposing them.

"Some of the scams are really elaborate," says Antoniao Utano, of the RCMP's Techonological Crime Program. "Criminals often write their own software to work with various card scanning devices."

by Alex Hebert
Reprinted with permission from The Ottawa Sun