Senior citizens are so often the victims of scam artists that come to the door or call over the phone with offers that are just too good to be true. Unfortunately, many elderly people are so hungry for attention or somebody to just talk to, they are often too eager to chat with the person angling to bilk them.
Help protect the seniors in your family - and your neighborhood. If you have elderly relatives or neighbors, why not print this out and drop it off with them, with a plate of warm cookies. Let them know somebody in the neighborhood cares.
Then offer to find them a reliable repair person or snow removal service. Angie’s List is a good place to start.
Cold-weather con artists often get in the door with low-ball prices, then hook unsuspecting homeowners with phony promises, scare tactics and bait-and-switch schemes that involve three common jobs:
Chimney sweeping. These scams usually start with telephone calls and mailed advertisements offering to clean a chimney for a bargain price, often $69 or less. But when the chimney sweep arrives, the clean-out is focused on your wallet. An “inspection” reveals any number of expensive problems — such as a supposed leak of carbon monoxide, structural damage or a worn-out chimney liner. Act immediately, you’re told.
This is great information - but it also applies to any other medical condition, too. The media is filled with hundreds of weight loss scams around New Year’s, when people are resolving to lose weight. The internet, and even the local newspaper and magazines are rife with thousands of so-called ‘cures’, ‘treatments’, pills, elixers, homeopathic treatments and more that are designed to do nothing more than take your money.
They can sound and look so very real, but remember that extraordinary claims always require extraordinary proof. So, start questioning and asking more of those claims. Legitimate firms will welcome your inquiries. The scam firms will resist giving you straight answers to simple questions.
Remember that people who are sick, are often very frightened and want to reach out for help from any source. They are vulnerable to great sounding claims for ‘cures’ or ‘treatments’ that could actually harm them.
Here are some concepts you need to keep in mind as a health care consumer:
Anecdotes are not a substitute for real science.
Stories told in advertising by ‘average’ people claiming cures or success are 99.99% bogus. Unless their stories are part of a larger, reputable scientific study that has been published and peer reviewed - and have been put into proper context, and weighted for other possible causative factors - they are utterly meaningless. These type stories are geared to appeal to your emotions, hopes and fears - not your rational decision-making processes.
Scientific language and words don’t equal scientific fact
People who write advertising copy for newspapers, magazines, flyers in the vitamin store, and online sources (anything with a dot.com) are very, very clever. They know how to get you sucked in and believing that the quoted sources are credible. All it takes is practice and a medical dictionary, and you can sound like you know what you’re talking about.
Reputable vendors and healthcare providers use simple language, and avoid unnecessary ‘jargon’, in order to help people truly understand a treatment or cure. If there are words you have to ‘look up’ or concepts you just don’t understand, then you might want to question the source. That doesn’t make you stupid. Only when you unquestioningly accept what you don’t understand, can we assume you’re short on brains.
Heresy doesn’t equal brilliance or accuracy
They laughed at Copernicus! They laughed at the Wright Brothers! Uh, they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. So what? Yes, there have been a few unconventional geniuses who gave us brilliant mechanical or scientific contributions. There was also Rube Goldberg that gave us inventions that were silly, unnecessary and utterly useless. Posing as a poor ‘misunderstood’ genius is another common ploy scam artists use to convince you to play along.
Corellation does not equal causation
In other words, just because one thing (such as a supposed cure) happens after a person got a treatment or took a ‘medicine’, you can’t just conclude the two things are related. If you were pitching baseball, and got two homeruns, and was wearing red underpants that day - should you assume that red underpants caused the homeruns? Maybe you’re a more skillful ball player than that. Maybe it was simply coincidence. Gamblers are particularly prone to this type of logical fallacy. B. F. Skinner proved in the laboratory that people have an inherent need to seek out relationships between events - and often ‘find’ them even when they don’t exist.
Snake oil hucksters know this, and capitalize on it by helping you to ‘see’ relationships between a ‘cure’, ‘treatment’, ‘pill’ or weight loss miracle and hoped for success.
‘Natural’ is a completely meaningless term
Ironically, people really seem to believe that ‘organic’ is the meaningless word. Use of the word ‘organic’ is bound by law, and people who use it to market their products must abide by strict FDA rules. Actually, ‘natural’ carries no legal definition. Arsenic is a ‘naturally occuring’ substance. It’s also deadly. Beware of products that tout themselves as ‘natural’. Somebody is trying to divert your attention with that word - perhaps from noticing that the product is naturally worthless.
Here are five questions to ask any doctor, medical provider or person wishing to sell you cures, treatments or medications:
Does this product work? Can you show me the scientific research to support its effectiveness?
What are the possible risks, side effects and benefits in my specific case?
Will it interfere with my current treatment plan? Will it have negative interactions with medications I now take?
Has this product proven to be safe? (Then check with the FDA yourself)
Can we talk about other treatments, medicines or products that might be just as effective in reducing my symptoms?
At the end of the day, you are responsible for doing your own ‘homework’ when it comes to medical or health claims. Remember that nobody else has as much at stake in your own health and survival as you do. Here are some additional resources:
Anatomy of an Online Health Scam - this is put out by the Canadian Government, and it’s very interesting. It mimics many of the typical scam websites, and as you read through it, and draw your cursor/mouse over the words, pop up bubbles will explain the tactics that scammers are using to gain your trust.
File this under: Duh, or There ain’t no free lunch.
It’s all over the web and has infiltrated Facebook. Now one of my friends is sending me FB emails, trying to get me involved in this. Yikes. Just a couple of minutes noodling around the web and I got a clue: It’s a scam.
Here’s the scoop:
SEATTLE — Thousands of people hoping to get their hands on a free iPad are being duped by scammers.
The slick promotions are coming in through Facebook, Twitter, even regular e-mail, cooked up to fit right in with all the iPad hype.
Scammers are targeting consumers with e-mail messages that look convincingly as if they’re from a trusted friend. The e-mails include a link to extremely professional looking Web sites that claim to be looking for beta testers for the iPad.
You’re supposed to be able to keep the iPad after you put it through a 2-month test.
These Web sites — and there are several — not only want your name and e-mail address, they want your e-mail password ‘and’ the name of your e-mail provider. The registration page includes a list of e-mail providers that includes providers targeting children.
I contacted Apple Headquarters in Cupertino, California. Tom Neumayr, with the company’s Media Relations Department, says these promotion sites are not authorized and Apple is doing no beta testing whatsoever with the iPad product.
It’s a sophisticated scam. Which means anyone who responds is giving strangers total access to their e-mail account: your name, address, e-mail address, e-mail provider and potentially everything they need to access other private information.
If you get an offer for a free iPad, even a new iPad at a discounted price, don’t bite. It’s not legit. And if you fell for the beta testing scam, contact your provider immediately and change your password and account information.
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Here are some other sites talking about the ‘free’ ipad scam:
Friday, January 21, 2011 at 21:11