“Hello Grandma? It’s your grandson Joel. I’m in some trouble and if I don’t pay this fine of $500 they’re going to put me in jail.”

“Grandad? It’s your granddaughter. Mom gave me your email because I need some money to pay for school.”

This is basically how “Grandparent Scams” began. Scammers started using this method when they assumed grandparents wouldn’t be able to determine whether or not it was actually their grandchildren on the other end of the line or keyboard. Fraudsters were banking on the fact that perhaps the voices and style of writing might not be familiar to the grandparents, especially if they didn’t have close contact. Add in the presumed advanced age of the grandparent who might feel confused and empathetic and the target audience was rife for being taken advantage of.  Armed with the bank or credit card information, the fraudsters could extract a cost much higher than the amount mentioned in the communication, both financially and personally.

Once you fall for it, it can be hard to get back up.

Fraudsters have teams of people phoning, emailing, and texting. And they are getting smarter. Armed with only a three second clip of a person’s voice, they can use AI to recreate a voice, and have it say whatever they want, according to David Maze of Lethbridge Polytechnic. They can hack into emails to gather information and mimic the style of communication.

Additionally, they scroll social media, to look for the things we willingly disclose publicly. This can give these fraudsters enough information about their targets to use in a conversation. Location of cities, activities they might be involved in, friends they might have; all of these easily accessible through Instagram and Facebook posts, or other social media channels. This lends credibility to the call, to the email, and to the scam.

So what can we as grandparents do, to avoid getting scammed?

• Establish a safe word or question/answer sequence within your family that only your family would know about. It can be anything that could be posed to the caller on the phone, or via email. “Do you have your cat with you?”, or “Is your foot still hurting?” , with answers prescribed beforehand. (If this sounds like old time spy talk – “The eagle has landed”, well it sort of is. And it works.) Don’t email this information to each other when you’re setting it up; share it in person or verbally on the phone.
• Keep your social media settings set to private for personal posts. If you are posting for business or commercial reasons, set up separate social media channels that only address those initiatives and updates.
• Check with family and friends if you receive an “emergency” call, to confirm that it is legitimate and that your grandkids or kids could conceivably be in the situation described, and don’t transfer any money until this is 100% verified.
• Financial institutions will never ask you for your personal information in order to transfer money. They have that information in their systems already if they are legitimate. Never give your financial details over the phone to caller to instigate a bank transfer or credit card charge. If you feel it’s real, or just want to verify the call, tell them you’ll call them back, using the phone number on the back of your bank or credit card.
• Monitor your credit card transactions and bank account balances on a regular basis to look for any abnormalities or charges you don’t recognize.

Moreover, financial motivation isn’t the only reason scammers are targeting the grandparent market. With upcoming elections in the U.S. and in Canada, fraudsters are hacking into emails and social media messaging to “advise” their “grandparents” of why they should vote in a certain way, citing opinions of perceived experts.

The best way to avoid being caught in a grandparent scam, and a good way to improve your mental health, according to recent research, is to stay in touch with your grandchildren through constant communication and dialogue, especially as they get older and can be directly contacted without the assistance of their parents. The better you know them, the better armed you are to fight against the (artificially real) intelligence the fraudsters have on you and your family.