Protect Your Senior Parents from Financial Scams

Elderly individuals in the United States collectively have $14 trillion dollars in savings, and there are hundreds of thousands of con artists who would like to steal their little chunk of it. There are people in this country that actually teach classes on how to rip off elderly people through outright fraud and by selling them bad and inappropriate investments! Senior adults have a major target painted at them, and you need to make sure that you keep a close eye on your senior parent's finances and make sure that they don't get scammed.

A very common practice among financial hucksters is to invite seniors out to a free meal on them as long as they listen and discuss the financial needs of the person getting the free dinner. If you are a senior adult, this could easily be the most expensive meal of your life. Seniors sometimes tend to feel an obligation to buy something if they have received a free dinner. Other times seniors simply don't understand what they are getting into and instead get wooed over by fast-talking salespersons. Usually the huckster will pitch all sorts of annuities, whole-life insurance, and other financial products that they will make a killing on.

Many scam artists are placing advertisements in newspapers targeted toward seniors that claim they will offer savings notes for up to 14%! Any senior who falls for this trick likely won't see a dime of the money they invest. We have to remember that if it sounds too good to be true, it most certainly is. This is a harsh reality, but sometimes our senior parents can be a bit naive and think they are getting a great deal, when in reality they're being ripped off.

There's a new scam targeting seniors that involves "investing guide books." They are essentially vanity press books which make financial analysts look a lot more savvy then they actually are. A financial author can get a financial book with their name and picture on it to show to their clients. This will make the financial advisor look a lot more credible than he or she actually is. They are attempting to show that they "wrote the book" on investing and it's worked for them very well. Shady financial counselors have been using these to provide themselves a new level of credibility with seniors, causing the senior to trust the huckster and invest their money with a person they normally otherwise would have not.

Seniors are even getting ripped off by phone companies. Many seniors are still leasing telephones from phone companies paying as much as $5 or $10 a month for the privilege when instead they could purchase the same phone for $15.00 at Wal-Mart and never have to pay a leasing fee again. They had these phones a few decades ago when you couldn't hook your own phone equipment into the system and just never switched. Take the time to look at the senior in your life's phone bill and make sure they aren't paying more than they need to. The same goes for internet service. AOL was $25 a month a decade ago and some people are still paying that rate without realizing they could get DSL service from AT&T for just $10.00 a month!

Many seniors are sitting ducks for con artists and shady financial sales people. Keep a close eye on your senior parents financial life to make sure everything is on the up and up.