Old-school scams thrive

For the past decade, heaps of mail offers have conned Marilu Nashel into spending thousands of dollars on illegitimate charities and fraudulent sweepstakes offers.

The 80-year-old Omaha woman has written checks to phony groups with respectable-sounding names like Help Hospitalized Veterans and the American Indian Relief Council.

“I've always had a soft touch for things like that,” she said.

The checks typically are for small amounts, $5 to $15, but over the years have added up to at least $3,000.

Fake charitable requests, sweepstakes offers and solicitations from psychics and prayer groups are examples of mail schemes that typically target senior citizens.

The Omaha office of the Better Business Bureau, which recently counseled Nashel on how to identify and avoid future mail scams, has heard hundreds of similar stories and collected thousands of such letters.

Younger people can fall prey to the come-ons as well.

Tim and Marie Busboom, ages 48 and 44, decided to register for a $2 million lottery after receiving an offer in the mail.

The Filley, Neb., residents sent in $30 and waited. A month passed. They heard nothing, but more such offers arrived in the mail.

They'd been duped.

“Everybody wants more money. We were hoping we would get a break and make things easier,” Busboom said. “I thought it was like Reader's Digest or Publishers Clearing House — we took it to be something like that.”

The federal Do Not Call registry prohibits telephone cold-calling by solicitors and telemarketers. But authorities can do little to stop or limit solicitation through the mail, even when it's illegal.

Postal Service officials don't have probable cause to institute a mail-blocking list that might prevent legitimate mail from being received, said David Margritz, a Postal Service inspector.

“This cannot be stopped,” said Jim Hegarty, head of the Better Business Bureau in Omaha. “What we can do is create a heightened awareness and warn seniors and consumers that they need to be very, very cautious.”

Mail scammers purchase contact information from mailing list companies, and acquire addresses and other contact information through online phone books and Internet data mining. The perpetrators send millions of letters, offers and requests with a goal of hooking just a fraction of the recipients.

Many mailings look so official they could fool even the most able-minded targets, Hegarty said. Add the declining mental capacity, loneliness and financial hardship of many senior citizens, and you have a fertile audience for scam artists, Hegarty said.

Though an octogenarian, Nashel said she still works as a credit card fraud detection analyst for First Data Corp., still drives and is in good health for her age. But she had no idea some of the charities she supported were fraudulent or that the sweepstakes offers were illegal.

Not having close family members nearby to help screen mail can be another weak spot for senior citizens. Nashel has only two nephews, who live in Michigan and Florida.

“Clearly, the scammers tend to target seniors with the assumption that there is some potential vulnerability there,” Hegarty said. “I think that there's a higher likelihood that when people get to a certain age, perhaps the individuals are not thinking as clearly as they were earlier in life.”

The BBB is striving to combat mail fraud by informing the public, establishing telephone hot lines and helping the Postal Service investigate elaborate schemes like those that have plagued Galen Olsberg, 76, of Omaha.

Olsberg said he constantly receives invoices and bills from fake companies using names that are variations of businesses listed in the Yellow Pages, where he advertises his tree-trimming company.

“The problem is that they sound so legitimate by talking about how they're affiliated with Yellow Pages,” Olsberg said. “Sometimes they get really insistent.”

Occasionally, Olsberg said, he has accidentally sent money to the phony companies.

Compared with other victims, though, Nashel's and Olsberg's losses are minor.

One 84-year-old widow living in Omaha lost $40,000 to Jamaican-operated frauds, Hegarty said. She received what appeared to be a sweepstakes check, deposited it in her bank, then wired $40,000 to an account as an “application fee.”

She realized when the check she deposited bounced that she'd been conned.

In 2008 alone, senior citizens nationwide were cheated out of more than $2 billion by one estimate, which Hegarty called conservative. Many cases go unreported because the victims are embarrassed or don't want their families to know, he said.

Approximately 99 percent of the scammers operate from foreign countries, Margritz said. That complicates the investigation, he said. And recovering lost money after it goes overseas is nearly impossible.

Hegarty said perpetrators use titles that include trigger words designed to take advantage of senior citizens' emotions and declining mental faculties, such as the Help Hospitalized Veterans and American Indian Relief Council, which ensnared Nashel. Both are known frauds, Hegarty added.

“They're really not charities at all. They're there to create the illusion that they're charities.”

Some schemes, like those popping up in the mailbox of Bellevue resident Regina Skubisz, 74, are designed to take advantage of some senior citizens' loneliness. These most commonly include fortunetellers, prayer offerings and clairvoyants.

“Some old people are sitting at home with nothing to do and they believe in them,” said Skubisz, who paid a small amount to a phony psychic. “Some of the letters are written so smart they can take anyone for a ride.

“They know the hardship you have and know you're going through hard times.”

Contact the writer:

444-1414, ross.boettcher@owh.com