Hi, blood money listeners. A couple of weeks ago, I had a friend call me and tell me that her mom had died very suddenly under what she considered to be very suspicious circumstances.

Her mom had recently moved in with a couple of roommates, and even though my friend had evidence that these people had used her mom's credit card both before and after her death,

and she considered these people very shady and told the police that. In the end, the police determined

that her mom's death had been a suicide and no autopsy was ever done. I was pretty shocked by this,

and as I've done more research, I've discovered how many more cases there are of

elder fraud going on out there. Actually, elder financial abuse, which is the type of elder

fraud that happens when the person being scammed has a personal relationship with a scammer,

is shockingly common. So I did a deep dive into elder fraud this week. I went over to AARP's website and I read about all the different kinds of scams. I've heard about a lot of them. Of course, you've got the online scams, the catfishing scams, romance scams. Then you've got people who cold call. They'll offer deals on prescription drugs or claim someone has won the lottery. The list really is endless. But I learned

about something I had not heard of. It's called the grandma scam. And I want to pass it on just in case

anyone out there's dealing with this. How it works is simple and also really cruel. What happens is that

someone will call an elderly person's number. And when the person picks up, they'll just say,

hi, grandma. And then a lot of times, the elderly person will guess the name of one of their

grandkids. And this way, the scammer doesn't even have to do the work of figuring out who the people

in the family are. Then once they've got them hooked, they'll say that they are somewhere stranded,

that they need money, they've had an emergency, and they'll try to convince the elderly person to wire money or sometimes even send things like cryptocurrency.

And this scam is so cruel. I recently had someone in a case I was working on tell me someone had done this to her. It was extremely creepy because it was late at night and her granddaughter had actually passed away. So this scammer is

pretending to be her dead granddaughter. It was really horrific. I was able to get that person's phone

number and I called and dealt with them, but it can be very

difficult to report cases like this. But all those types of scams are done by anonymous people.

Back to the AARP article, they had a section called stopping fraud in the family. And in this section,

they really talk about how most people who steal significant amounts of money from the elderly are people

they know and people close to them. So this is not strangers. This is family members, sometimes

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