I’m sure that we’ve all heard stories about this before. Whether they were romance scams, gift cards scams, or tech support scams, we all think that they’re not going to happen to us. And because we are relatively educated in the space, we might not. But this doesn’t mean that our parents won’t.

Not to give away too much information about myself here, but being born on the very front end of what most people consider to be the millennial-generation cutoff, both my parents and my in-laws are over the age of 65, and knowing that I do a lot in the crypto-space, they have started asking me questions that have greatly alarmed me: “One of my friends is telling me about how I can invest $100,000 and get $3 million later!” or… “have you heard about this coin (fill-in-the blank), it’s barely worth anything now, but I was told that it should go from cents to hundreds of dollars in just a few months!” If these sort of statements don’t frighten you, they should — the numbers of scams involving the elderly have skyrocketed and there’s no indication that they won’t stop growing.

Fortunately, I appreciate that my parents are willing and able to talk to me about this kind of stuff, and I recognize that I have the benefit of having a very open conversation with my parents about investing in general. And as I’ll breakdown why, I hope that after reading this article you will recognize the importance of having these conversations with your parents and loved ones too.

A bit of background first

Thankfully my parents are already pretty skeptical about investing in general, but unfortunately this lesson didn’t come without a price. Decades ago my grandfather was enticed by one of his “friends” about an investment opportunity that was crazy lucrative, influencing him to invest his life savings a few years before he passed away. Shortly after the money was transferred, the “investment” was rugged, causing a multi-generational impact on the entire family.

Perhaps the biggest problem my grandfather faced was that he wasn’t open to his children or his wife about the investments were making. For by the time he spoke about his error to his wife, the money was already gone. What worries me further today is that in the new age of tech and cryptocurrency, scammers are specifically targeting seniors because not only do they often have less knowledge about the crypto-space, but because they are usually sitting on relatively larger retirement cushions, and these cushions can be lost in a matter of minutes, if not seconds.

According to last year’s FBI Elder Fraud report, cryptocurrency has become the preferred method of payment for nearly all types of scams, and has risen by more than 70% compared to the year before:

“The number of elderly victims has risen at an alarming rate, while the loss amounts are even more staggering. In 2021, over 92,000 victims over the age of 60 reported losses of $1.7 billion to the IC3. This represents a 74 percent increase in losses over losses reported in 2020.”

If you’ve followed my previous posts, you’ll know that I have been a victim of a scam myself, and many bloggers and influencers I follow can easily tell you the same — or at the very least that they’ve gotten rugged once or twice.(And trust me, if a lead dev at Axie Infinity can get phished causing a $625 million dollar hit, then probably you or anyone else you know can be a victim too.) What worries me more however are how scam artists are specifically targeting older adults in various ways, and as crypto gains more adoption, I assume that the scams on elderly will only gain more traction too.

How are they targeting the elderly? There’s plenty, but perhaps the most common include:

Pig Butchering:

Where a scammer feeds promises to the victim of love or wealth, continuing to get them to deposit more and more of their funds into fake wallets or projects.

Tech Support Scams:

This is probably the most prevalent form of online scamming, but it usually involves the victim clicking through a mailicious link after being notified that their computer has some type of security risk that needs fixing.

Ponzi Schemes and Pump-and-Dumps:

These of course are rife in crypto, where they involve using victim’s funds to pay off other people’s investments, or basically leave the victims holding losses while the scammer sells off early.

Why is it important for you to talk to parents?

To your parents, by knowing some of the in’s and out’s of crypto, you might be the only rational and supporting actor in their lives that can warn them about the dangers of crypto scams. And according to a recent okblog post:

“Many elders have avoided being scammed because a younger relative recognized something was wrong and reported it appropriately.”

This means that you might be the only backstop of information that your parents or loved ones have before becoming one of the 10’s of thousands of elder crypto-scam victims that are occur every year.

Conclusion:

At this point, at least when it comes to Crypto (and hopefully everything else that can significantly impact their retirement) I have made my parents and in-laws promise me that they’ll talk to me first before selling off the farm. Am I an expert on crypto? No. But I do think that I can at least help buffer some of the risks that they might take if I wasn’t there.

Thanks again for taking the time to read this, and if you haven’t already, be sure to follow me on twitter to get all my latest updates: https://twitter.com/CryptosWith

Disclaimer: None of the content within this article is meant to be financial advice. Please do your own research and/or contact a financial advisor to find what investments might be best for you.