Con artists attempt to scam Charlo woman
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CHARLO — Inez Vincent was recently the target of a group of con artists who were after her Social Security number and money.
It all started some time ago when she received a phone call from a man pretending to be a police officer in Canada. This individual claimed her grandson was in jail in Canada on $5,000 bond.
Not believing him, she asked to speak with her grandson. The officer agreed and put another individual on the phone.
“By god, it was my grandson’s voice,” Vincent said.
She actually had a conversation with a man who was able to impersonate her grandson’s voice almost exactly. She asked why he was calling her rather than his parents, and he said something to the effect of, “Because I’ve put them through so much already, I’d rather handle it this way.”
When asked why he was in Canada, he said he was there for a friend’s wedding and his friend had drugs on him when they tried to board the plane home.
“They had an answer for everything,” she said.
The lieutenant came back on the phone and again asked for the $5,000 bond. Vincent refused, but offered her son’s phone number and suggested they call him.
When Vincent’s son was alerted that his own child might be in prison, he hung up with the police officer and phoned his son.
It turns out the young man was in Polson during the entire ordeal. He was not in Canada and was not in prison.
Jane Morton, a senior Medicare patrol representative, said the elderly are often targets of scams.
“There are all kinds of crooks in the Untied States and elsewhere,” Morton said. “The, ‘calling grandma and pretending to be a grandkid’ is a really common one. ‘Don’t tell mom because I don’t want to get in trouble’ is very common.”
Two weeks ago, Vincent received a second phone call from an Asian couple posing as Medicare representatives. The duo was insistent on finding out her Social Security number so they could see if she qualified for a new medical card to go along with the one she already had.
“That didn’t make sense to me because Medicare would have sent us something in the mail; I would have gotten a call; it would have been in the news, something,” she said.
After several minutes of back-and-forth arguing, the individual asked Vincent to get her checkbook. He read every number, left to right, on several checks. The numbers he read were identical to those on her checks.
Vincent asked to speak with his supervisor. After a pause, the same person got on the phone, changing his voice slightly, but his accent was the same.
When Vincent asked for someone who spoke better English, a female came on the line and again asked for her Social Security number.
Thankfully, Vincent never gave them her information and, so far, no strange checks have come across her account.
Perhaps the strangest thing about Vincent’s circumstance was that she does not own a computer and has never ordered anything online. She uses her checks to pay local bills and uses her credit card for gas and food on long trips, and has no idea how the crooks got all of her information.
“I’m 80 years old and I’m a feisty old thing,” she said. “The big thing was that they didn’t know my Social Security number and they were really digging for that. I want to warn people; do not give them your Social Security number.”
“They’re very high-pressure. They talk a mile-a-minute so you can’t understand what they’re saying. I have a lot of friends who would have fallen for it,” Vincent said.
Above all, Vincent wanted to make other senior citizens in the area aware of what’s going on and warn them that Medicare does not have the program advertised by the con men.
“I think we’ve gotten too damn smart for our own britches,” she said. “I think we’ll have more of this because the economy is so bad.”
Morton said Medicare is a huge target for scams.
“I’ve seen estimates that as much as 10 percent of what Medicare pays out in a year is fraud,” she said. “Here, in rural Montana, we haven’t seen so much of it because we have such a sparse population. The profits aren’t as big, so we’re not a very lucrative target.”
Undersheriff Dan Yonkin said it is extremely important that if an individual did not initiate the call, he or she should not give out any personal information over the telephone.
“Sometimes they’ll give you a number and say, ‘Well, here’s our number, call us back and you can verify who we are.’ Don’t fall for that. A lot of the time it’s just a cell phone in Canada,” Yonkin said.
