YOU MIGHT RECALL my article warning about home title theft, where scammers try to claim ownership of your home. Since I wrote the article, the Federal Trade Commission has warned that one preventive measure, so-called title lock insurance, is bogus: It only alerts you to title fraud after the fraud has happened.
Thanks to a recent AARP article, there’s now greater awareness about home title fraud and ways to protect yourself. What can you do to prevent title fraud?

SOME YEARS AGO, an elderly neighbor came to our door, asking for a favor. She was looking for packing tape because she’d sold her television and needed to ship it. She went on to say that the buyer, who she’d found on eBay, was in Nigeria. It was, of course, an obvious scam. But for whatever reason, she couldn’t see it.
Today, scams like this are better known and easier to recognize. But what makes online fraud such a problem is that the crooks are always developing new tricks.

I WAS A VICTIM OF identity theft. It wasn’t anything I did. Rather, it was what my former employer did.
During the pandemic, many employees were working remotely, including a member of the human resources department. She received an email from the CEO requesting that she send him the W-2s for all employees. So she did. Unfortunately, the email wasn’t from the CEO. It was sent from a shopping mall in Saudi Arabia.
As soon as she hit send,

MONEY MANAGERS Raj Rajaratnam and Joel Greenblatt share a number of similarities. They’re almost exactly the same age. Both received business degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, and both started well-known hedge funds. But the similarities end there.
During the 10 years that Greenblatt operated his fund, Gotham Capital, it delivered returns averaging 50% a year, versus 10% for the S&P 500. Thanks to his success, Greenblatt retired from full-time work in 1994 at age 37.

DO YOU REMEMBER the headline, “Brooke Astor’s Son Guilty in Scheme to Defraud Her”? He swindled his famous mother out of millions, once by pocketing a $2 million commission on the sale of an Impressionist painting he purloined from her New York City apartment. She lived to age 105 but suffered from dementia.
F. Scott Fitzgerald purportedly said, “The rich are different than you and me.” But maybe not when it comes to elder fraud.

I KEEP SEEING THEM—overly complicated, overly expensive investment portfolios. The most recent belonged to a widow in her 70s, with modest earned income, Social Security benefits and about $5,000 in taxable fund distributions for 2023. She was someone I helped during the recent tax-filing season, when I was volunteering at an AARP TaxAide site in Monmouth County, New Jersey.
Her portfolio held about a dozen mutual funds, most of which I’d never heard of.

FOR THE PAST SIX years, we’ve rented a house in Florida for a month or so. We used VRBO, and all went well. Even minor problems with a house were quickly addressed by the owners or their rental agents.

Not this year.

In September 2023, we rented a condo on the beach in Hillsboro Beach for February 2024. In December, I received an e-mail from the rental agent, Houzlet, Inc., saying the owner had financial problems and was selling the place,

THE HOLIDAY SEASON used to be a time when we’d write and mail more checks than usual. Some were gifts to family, while others were year-end charitable donations. But with the rise in mail theft and check washing, we’ve been on a campaign to limit the number of checks we write, plus we’ve almost eliminated the mailing of checks. Here are eight things we’ve done to reduce our exposure to check fraud:

We opened a secondary no-fee checking account and opted out of the overdraft protection.

SEVERAL MONTHS AGO, I received a phone call that left me shaken and bewildered. The voice on the other end claimed to be from the Social Security Administration. The caller informed me that my Social Security number had been compromised in a significant security breach. My heart raced as I contemplated the potential consequences, even as the urgency in the caller’s voice gave me little time to think.
The caller asked for my personal information,

“YOUR CHECKING ACCOUNT balance is low.” It’s an alert none of us wants to receive, especially if we’ve just been paid. But that was the message that a friend—let’s call him Ron—got recently. A hacker had gained control of his account and started bleeding it dry.
Ron, it turns out, was lucky to have received that alert. Another friend—let’s call him Arthur—received no such alert when his account was also taken over by hackers this summer.

MY WALLET WAS STOLEN many years ago when I was traveling on business. I had gotten onto a crowded elevator at my hotel. The last person to get on was a woman who pretended to get her heel caught in the elevator door.
The thieves were a young couple—and they were real pros. While we were focused on her, her partner proceeded to open the flap of my handbag and help himself to my wallet.

ON FEB. 7, 1910, AN ODD event occurred in the English town of Weymouth. A group of five arrived for a tour of HMS Dreadnought, a battleship that was the pride of Britain’s navy. The five were welcomed with fanfare, their staff having communicated in advance that they were members of the Abyssinian royal family. Their appearance was impressive: flowing robes, great jewels and turbans. Through an interpreter, the Abyssinian emperor offered military honors to the ship’s crew.

A QUARTER OF ALL reported losses from fraud in 2021 originated on social media, according to the Federal Trade Commission, and those losses cost about $770 million.
Yes, social media is a popular way to keep in touch with family and friends, receive news and get information. According to Pew Research, 73% of people ages 50 to 64 used social media in 2021, as did 45% of those ages 65 and over. But using social media requires vigilance.

ON JUNE 15, THE NEWS was broken by The Oregonian of a massive hack at Oregon’s Department of Motor Vehicles, apparently leading to the theft of sensitive details about most of Oregon’s 3.5 million holders of a driver’s license or ID card. Incidents like this, along with the huge 2017 Equifax hack, give criminals cheap and easy access to key personal information that many organizations routinely use to verify our identities and screen our credit applications.

FINANCIAL FRAUD against Americans age 60 and older costs $3 billion a year, and the average loss per incident is $120,000, according to a 2020 study by the AARP Public Policy Institute. And scams against older Americans are increasing. The FBI reports that losses more than doubled from 2019 to 2021 and internet swindles against elderly victims rose 84% in 2022.
My wife was the target of a fraud and you may have been,