Earlier this year when a San Francisco widow in her 80s went to her tax preparer, she brought along a grocery bag filled with $17,500 worth of canceled checks for 1993. All were written to slick-talking telemarketers who had sold her fraudulent investments, not-so-free sweepstakes winnings, and vacations and products that were supposed to be valuable.
Among the "big" prizes were two 19-inch TV sets that cost her $2,000, plaques, boxes of pens and pencils, cheap jewelry, Christmas ornaments, cleaning products, health and beauty supplies, stackable frying pans that lost their handles when she tried to use them, and almost 100 boxes of yellow Frisbees imprinted, ironically enough, with the Nancy Reagan anti-drug slogan, "Just Say No."
Ironic, because "no" is exactly what fraud experts counsel the woman should have said to the flim-flam phone artists in the first place.
Instead, she became a big-time victim of telemarketing fraud--what Federal Trade Commission officials call "the plague of the 1990s marketplace" and the fastest-growing consumer fraud in the United States.
Each year, millions of Americans, especially senior citizens, are bilked out of an estimated $40 billion nationwide by crafty telephone crooks pitching endless schemes.
Or asking for contributions to organizations that sound legitimate but don't exist.
Or sending a postcard that says: "You've won one of these five prizes, but you must call this 900 number." That phone call usually costs the caller $3 a minute.
The telemarketing scam problem is so severe that special federal task forces have been set up across the country to try to combat it. State attorney generals and corporation commissions have telemarketing investigators trying to cope with burgeoning complaints.
The National Fraud Information Center (NFIC), a project of the National Consumers League in Washington, D.C., operates a 24-hour national fraud hot line for consumers to report telemarketing fraud. That toll-free number, (800) 876-7060, gets about 250 calls a day, said NFIC Director John Barker.
In a new effort to educate consumers about telemarketing fraud, the NFIC, in conjunction with MasterCard International, has recently launched a national TV campaign, "Know the difference. Hang up on fraud."
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Anyone with a telephone and a mailing address can be a victim of telemarketing fraud, but fraud investigators agree that the most likely prey are senior citizens.
