Phil Cannella interviews FBI Agent Brian Herrick - Scams on Seniors
Channel: Crash Proof Retirement
Date: 2012-03-19

As CEO of Retirement Media, Inc., Phil Cannella strives to bring truth to the American retiree. In a live interview on The Crash Proof Retirement Show, Mr. Cannella asks FBI agent, Brian Herrick (head of Philadelphia's cyber-crime division), what retirees should look out for to avoid becoming a victim.

"What hope can you give people in retired
years that are being scammed, what's the
FBI doing? What hope can you give them,
and what's the warning the people that
do cyber attacks in general?"

"Where I see it affecting mostly our older adults is in the area of actually cyber frauds or cyber scams. Roughly forty percent of the complaints that come into the Philadelphia FBI office on a daily basis involves some kind of internet fraud or some kind of scam. That typically will target older Americans that are looking to try and get access to, you know, their their retirement incomes and whether that's an email phishing scam where it says that your identity has been compromised or your credentials to this this website have been compromised click on this link here or whether it's some kind of Ponzi scheme which is perpetrated through the use of the internet or emails we see a lot of people who receive a notification that they've won something. The FBI does host a website which is WWW 'Looks to good to be true' all one word dot com and we have up there dozens and dozens of the different common fraud schemes that people can kind of take a look at, whether it's an auction fraud some kind of financial fraud work-from-home frauds things involving identity theft, pharmacy fraud as well people looking to get low-cost access to pharmaceuticals may be attracted to websites that look to sell pharmaceuticals at unreasonably low costs. The concerns there is the possibility of counterfeit pharmaceuticals coming from foreign countries. Pharmaceuticals being given out with our prescription so a lot of that information looks too good to be true dot com we have have featured up on that website you never want to be sending money via an escrow system like a western union because once that money's gone out of your account it's gone for good."