Elderly People
Don't Always Know the Difference
by Jenn
(Utah)
Showing my grandmother how to use the Internet was pretty frustrating, but in the end, it proved very rewarding.
I could send her pictures of her great-grandchildren, send her an email during the day to check in on her, and she improved her cribbage skills online as well.
I was totally thrilled, until I was helping her pay some bills one day and I saw her credit card was billed for several thousand dollars more than she usually spends. Upon further examination, I realized she was being scammed online.
Apparently, she couldn’t tell the difference between the spam email that made it through her junk filter into her email box and the real thing. She thought these solicitations were for real, so she donated to several “charities” online, and purchased some weight-loss products.
Needless to say, anything she received was worthless, and someone started wracking up her credit card bill even higher, by pretending to be her! Someone stole my grandma’s identity and was using it to do all sorts of things! Someone else was using her credit card number and buying all sorts of nonsense online, too!
Naturally, I closed the credit card account and reported the losses. It’s taken months to clean up the mess from the identity thieves, but fortunately the bank was very helpful.
I reset Grandma’s email filters to only accept email from people she knows, and I told her NOT to buy anything online without checking that the site was secure, and to ask me to check it for her first, and to NEVER give out her personal information, unless she was on an approved site.
We started a list of sites that were approved- her bank, her credit card, her cell phone, a couple of trustworthy sites she likes to shop from. If she wants to buy something, but isn’t sure, she will send me a link to the site or ask me about how secure it is before she uses her credit card number.
I have also taught her to monitor her credit card statement several times a month, to make sure there are no fraudulent charges, and to check that the people who stole her identity don’t have access to her new account information.
Click here to post comments.
