Grandparents Scam On the Rise!

Okay this is just sick. Do thieves and scam artists not have a heart. I think not. The grandparents' scam is when someone calls an elderly person on the phone and pretends to be a relative like a grandson and claims to have been arrested. And requests money from the elderly person to get out of jail or to help pay the other driver involved in a car accident. They then give the elderly person instructions to either wire money to them or to go to Walmart and purchase Greendot prepaid cards with cash and then call them back and give them the codes off the backs of the Greendot cards. The reason this scam almost always works is because the elderly person is always eager to help out his/her grandchild. And they rarely call the grandchild or the parents of the grandchild to verify he needs help in the first place. So people warn your elderly parents NOT to send money to ANYONE who calls them on the phone saying so and so is in trouble. Tell the elderly person to call you directly and verify the request. One guy, Roger W. ( who didn't want his full information disclosed in the article for fear of being scammed again), recently testified before the US Congress telling how he was scammed out $7,000.00 by someone in Montreal. Roger called other relatives after the fact and found out the caller on the phone was not in fact his eldest grandson. Sigh. Oh well, maybe next time Roger will call his son or daughter to ask if this is true b4 he sends more money to some crook.