Joe Gavalis: Beware of the “too good to be true” scams

Before members of the Northwest Georgia Regional Commission Council, Joe Gavalis held up an iTunes card, the main instrument used by scammers to defraud seniors, he said. When he purchased the card from Walmart, the cashier even commented on how she tries to tell people about their use in scams, but they go through with it anyway.

Gavalis, the law enforcement coordinator for the North Georgia Elder Abuse Task Force and a retired federal agent of 30 years, told commissioner members last week that nearly a three-quarters of all abuse suffered by seniors is financial in nature, committed by family members and professional scam artists alike.

“If it’s too good to be true than it probably isn’t true,” he said, referring to callers claiming seniors have won the Irish or Jamaican lottery, both commonly-used scams. “If you never entered it you didn’t win.”

The two other forms of elder abuse are physical and institutional, Gavalis said, and instances of all three forms have been on the rise. In just six years, from 2010 to 2016, the GBI recorded an increase of more than 1,700 cases of elder abuse in Georgia.

In Gordon County, there were 59 elder abuse cases from 2010 to June 2018, according to the GBI. In comparison, Floyd County had 206 cases during this same period.

“Frauds are everywhere,” Gavalis said. “We just have to be aware of them.”

Seniors are especially vulnerable to the narratives created by professional scammers, who manipulate the trustworthiness of their victims, Gavalis said. Scammers will also use the love seniors have for their family members, especially grandkids, against them, he continued.

In sharing a recent case, Gavalis said one woman was led to believe her grandson had been arrested by the DEA in Atlanta and she needed to send $9,000 to free him from jail. So she followed their instructions and withdrew the money from her account and mailed it to an address in Atlanta which ended up being a hotel that the perpetrators would only pick the packages up from.

But scamming can be like fishing, Gavalis said, and after a victim bites once, the line may be cast again. The perpetrators called her back and she sent another $9,000. On the third point of contact, the woman was asked for $15,000, which she said she didn’t have, but as she did her grandson walked in the door, after she had already lost $18,000.

These scams are not just led by individuals, rather they are frequently operated by a collection of people working under a collective, making calls out of an office in a distant place, Gavalis said.

Gavalis, who travels around the region speaking at senior centers and warning of possible scams and other forms of elder abuse, said the cooperation of law enforcement agencies across not only county lines but state lines as well is essential to attacking the problem of elder abuse, particularly scams.

“The crooks don’t say I can only operate in the city of Rome,” Gavalis said, their reach can extend across the country, the continent and the globe.

Through the sharing of information between agencies, connections can be made to the motives of these criminal actors, and similar cases and people are revealed, Gavalis continued.

A recent issue to emerge in Georgia is the rise of unlicensed personal care homes, Gavalis said.

“You wouldn’t put your cats in them,” he said, adding the “squalor and horrible conditions” are no place for loved ones.

In one case, employees at one home were taking the SNAP — Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — cards of patients and selling them in South Carolina, Gavalis said.

For more information on how to protect against elder abuse, visit the Georgia Department of Law Consumer Protection Unit at consumer.ga.gov.

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Joe Gavalis: Beware of the “too good to be true” scams