Just last month, the FTC sued Harris Jewelry, whose stores are fixtures in military communities, for falsely telling military customers their purchases would help raise their credit scores and for adding expensive protection plans to customers’ purchases without their consent. Those cons range from fraudulent business opportunities and fake investments to bogus charities and sweepstakes scams. AARP found that military families are almost 40% more likely to lose money to scammers than civilians - and that when they do fall for scams, they lose more money. The amount of money lost is growing at a faster rate than the general population: In 2021, $267 million was lost, well over double the $105 million military families lost to scams in 2020. In 2020, the Federal Trade Commission received more than 200,000 complaints about scams and frauds from the military community. About a quarter of those losses were through social media, where scammers can easily hide behind fake personas or accounts and make quick contact with millions of people. That’s up from around $3.3 billion lost in 2020. You have to be totally on your game.”Īmericans lost a whopping $5.8 billion to fraud and scams last year, according to the Federal Trade Commission. “Unfortunately, it’s just everywhere you turn.
“There’s no way to put the genie back in the box, as far as I can see,” says Linda Sherry, director of national priorities at Consumer Action, a national consumer advocacy group. The increase of misinformation during the Covid-19 pandemic has only made things worse. Scams - deceptions intended to steal someone’s personal information or money - have proliferated in recent years, as private information has migrated online, and social media and technology have made it simple to quickly reach huge numbers of people. If it feels as if your voicemail is flooded with messages asking about your car’s extended warranty or telling you the IRS has been trying to reach you, you’re not alone. “We want to make sure that we arm our veterans and their families with tools to fight back,” Broussard says. So that opens up to be targets.”īut while scammers prey on patriotism and the trust people place in members of the military, simple steps - like knowing how and why scammers operate the way they do - can help military families put up effective lines of defense. “Scammers know that veterans have access to the different benefits,” says Troy Broussard, an Army veteran who runs AARP’s Veterans and Military Families Initiative. A steady income and military benefits, a soft spot for helping those who serve and those in need, frequent moves and deployments, and a unique culture that scammers can tap into to gain unwarranted trust make military members and families particular targets of scammers. They’re also more likely to lose money in scams. Service members, veterans, and their families are more likely to be targeted by scammers than civilians, according to research conducted by AARP. “They should not have to worry about being targeted and taken advantage of by malicious scammers.”īut service members do have to worry about being targeted by scammers - perhaps even more than their civilian counterparts do. “Service members have given so much to our country,” Xavier Becerra, then the California attorney general, said in a statement after Flanagan and his associates were indicted on 69 counts of conspiracy to commit fraud, forgery, identity theft, and grand theft, among other things, in 2019. The service members who had signed the forms lost a combined $4.8 million. In turn, Flanagan and his co-conspirators earned more than $2 million in commissions on the “sales” over nearly a decade. Instead, they bought unnecessary life insurance policies - without the sailors’ knowledge - and authorized withdrawals to pay for them from the sailors’ bank accounts. Brandon Banzhaf/Army)īut the nearly 5,000 applications that sailors and Marines signed didn’t actually open retirement accounts. During tax season, the military advises that troops be especially vigilant so they’re not targeted by scam artists who claim to be from the Internal Revenue Service.
0 kommentar(er)
