Reverse Phone Number Lookup May Protect Seniors from Fraud

Times are tough; the poor economy has put a lot of people in desperate situations. Sadly, con artists have been inventing new ways to take advantage of this desperation, and often in a completely shameless manner. These individuals like to prey on the elderly who are sometimes a little confused by the way our hi-tech world works and can often be gullible.

Recent newscasts abound with stories about incidents involving conned senior citizens. There is the story about the multiple extortions from a man in his 90s. Over the course of several weeks he'd been receiving fraudulent phone calls informing him he won all kinds of contests he'd never entered, and hundreds of thousands in cash prizes are awaiting. All he needed to do to get the money was send some money first (several mailings of amounts between $500-2000) for processing. The man diligently did as he was told and sent a total of several thousand of dollars to addresses all over the country and abroad. Needless to say, he never got his winnings.

The police instructed the elderly victim not to send money to anyone and explained how to recognize fraud in the future. They didn't even appear to try to search for suspects or find and return the money. Why didn't they at least try to follow up on the sources of those calls? All they had to do was run some reverse phone number lookups to see if they can trace the numbers to the locations where they may have found the criminals, and possibly even recovered the money!

Interestingly enough, the old man soon received a call from a Jamaican cop who informed him that he caught the culprits who had some of his money, and the money was being wired back to him. It seems the local police may have at least tried to match those efforts and recover more of his losses. These days we hear frequent stories about the ways reverse phone number lookups can improve people's lives, and even save them. The police are starting to catch on too, according to other accounts, but not nearly fast enough.