Welcome to the Club — Part 1! | Real Life

We’re all members, or surely soon will be, of the “Ripped-Off/Scammed/Defrauded Club”. As you know, everyone — and the experts tells us that seniors are a preferred target — who does business with anyone is vulnerable to financial fraud, and therefore eligible. For instance:

Soon after the new chip-embedded credit card arrives, its issuing bank cancels it because some sneak charged a thousand-square-inch flat screen mega-pixel TV to it in Honolulu. “Kevin”, whose accented-English places him somewhere east of Istanbul, calls to inform us charmingly and convincingly that we’ve been especially selected to take advantage of a can’t-lose binary investment fund — Lucky us!

An “IRS agent” interrupts dinner to threaten lawsuit and confiscation of our treasures unless we immediately authorize payment via our credit accounts for “criminally evaded taxes and penalties”.

Our e-mail inbox brings “an acclaimed financial newsletter’s eminent Wall Street insider’s newly-opened-to-the-public offering” of his “spectacularly successful special opportunity fund,” which of course is a ponzi scheme that will disappear into a Caribbean island jungle when the fraud cops detect it.

These are some of the latest consumer financial fraud schemes. We marvel about how the scammers operating them and all their other schemes get through to our accounts, how much they know about us, and how clever they can be. They score well over 50 million hits a year in this country alone, according to the Federal Trade Commission. So, welcome to the “club” -- It’s huge and it’s growing exponentially.

Yes, you’re right: Those examples really aren’t funny. Consumer financial fraud is high-priority serious business for all of us. And yes, we’re getting smart about combating it.

Some of our techniques: We heed the abundant “how-to-” seminars and, learning multiple defenses to protect ourselves with. We’re almost paranoid about revealing ID numbers and passwords.

Companies and agencies provide firewalls for us, and we select the most aggressively consumer-protective ones to do business with.

We’ve become expert at detecting too-good-to-be-true deals and purveyors of phony detection/protection/recovery services. And we alert our providers and the authorities when fraud’s lightning strikes us. And so on.

But yet, the relentless assaults continue, “merely because we have money to steal, not because of a failing on our part”. So says The National Center For Victims Of Crime. Maybe penniless poverty is the only totally “bullet-proof” defense!

There’s a legion of knowledgeable friends and allies whose mission is to help us, but we don’t utilize them because we just aren’t sufficiently aware of them. We’d really benefit if we were. They are the many government agencies, industry associations, and non-government organizations who energetically educate and advise us, receive and promulgate alerts, investigate reports, apprehend and prosecute offenders, enforce regulatory laws, advocate legislation and “fight-back” projects, all to protect and help us.

For example, Congress, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the securities industry long ago created the Financial Industries Regulatory Agency, our public/private non-government body that protects our investment interests and the integrity of the securities industry. And a quarter-century ago FINRA created the FINRA Investor Education Foundation, offering many projects, initiatives, and information at its websites, among them: SaveAndInvest.org; www.SaveAndInvest.org/FraudCenter and www.Saveandinvest/org/protect-your-money.

There we can read and download over three dozen no-cost (yes, free!) unfortunately under-publicized terrific info-publications, some also available in print. There’s a lot about fraud, but also about topics such as job-loss and recovery, smart investing, FINRA investor services, how to file a financial services complaint, alerts about common risky and dubious propositions, successful money management, insights into various investment products, and resources for veterans and their families.

The National Center for Victims of Crime is a large and influential nonprofit n.g.o. committed to victims (and their families) of crimes of all types, is strong on fraud, and offers advocacy and guidance at its website: www.VictimsofCrime.org.

Together those two agencies offer “Taking Action — An Advocate’s Guide To Assisting Victims of Financial Fraud,” another under-publicized free treasure, seventy-seven pages of comprehensive understanding, wisdom, and support-resource information. It’s downloadable and printable, at its link: www.saveandinvest.org/file/sites/default/files/Taking-Action- An-Advocates-Guide- to-Assisting- Victims-of- Financial-Fraud.pdf.

Whether we’re prepping to lead a study group about rip-offs, reacting to an infuriating hit against our assets, wisely guarding our financial gems against invasion, equipping ourselves to take action when needed, or just curious, this book seems to be a terrific anti-fraud everyday action reference manual to keep front and center among our desktop or cyber-file financial management resources.

It covers prevention, detection, alerting and reporting, damage control, and recovery. Very desirably, it describes dozens of other helpful fraud-fighting government and n.g.o. agencies that are there for us, federal and local, tells us what they do, and gives us their contact information.

Let’s explore some of its gems in the next segment or two, just because some might have eluded us, and because perhaps we’ll do well to re-visit many of the more familiar ones.

So, aren’t we glad to discover these under-publicized highly beneficial agencies and their help-sites? If nothing else, surfing them provides a welcome respite from the TV news channels’ election circus

Worthy of special mention here and now: Fraud-defense gurus and literature all advocate one commandment -- “Thou shalt ‘fine-tooth’ thy three annual free credit reports, and rise up and smite any errors or suspicious items therein!”. But, lest you deluge me with emails exclaiming that the three credit agencies force us to jump through endless hoops and seem to want the same information from us that the scam artists seek (hmmmm!) before acquiescing to furnish the reports, here’s good news:

Congress has ended that obstacle course. Now, one set of keystrokes to:

www.annualcreditreport.com/manualRequestForm.action: gets you to an on-line “instant access” option and alternatively a simple downloadable one-page form called “Annual Credit Report Request Form” asking for only your name, d.o.b., previous mailing address, Social Security number, and which agencies’ reports you want (you can get all three). You mail it, along with copies of your Social /Security card and driver’s license to prove that you really are you, to the Annual Credit Report Request Service’s magic post office box in Atlanta (it’s on the form). After it arrives, you then can expect your report(s) to be mailed to you within fifteen days.

If you have a problem acquiring the publications or the form, I’ll happily print and mail some to you at my cost, a few cents’ worth to a couple of bucks’ worth of paper and ink, and the few ounces worth of postage.

Also, how about sharing your own clever-scam discoveries and experiences with our fellow “club members?” You’re welcome to email them to me.

This story was originally published June 24, 2016 at 9:35 AM with the headline "Welcome to the Club — Part 1! | Real Life."