These Scams Could Wipe Out Your Life's Savings

We've all worked hard for our money and the last thing I want to see is for any of us to get scammed out of it. So in today's video I'm going to share with you three scams. The first two of which are scams that unfortunately some people have lost their entire life savings. I don't want to see that happen to you and unfortunately as we get older into our 50s or 60s or in retirement we become more susceptible to scams like this. Frankly we're just not as sharp mentally and we we've accumulated more money so we're more attractive targets for the scammers. So let's jump in and talk about the first one. The first one I call a social media scam and that's where somebody's YouTube channel or their Facebook page or their Instagram, LinkedIn, whatever it is, gets hacked and the hackers go in and they put on a video that looks like it's from a well-known respected person and unfortunately with AI now it's super easy to take a video that was shot of a well-known person and literally just change the words that that person is saying. So for instance right now their scams were Elon Musk unfortunately. His voice and his appearance has been taken over by AI so it's a video that really took place with him but they're changing what he's saying and essentially what the scam involves is instead of putting your money with a known custodian, firms like Fidelity, Schwab, Vanguard, folks like that, people are being scammed and talked into putting their money with an unknown custodian and it typically starts off where somebody's putting a little bit of money in and then they're showing these great investment returns with different maybe cryptocurrency, different investment tools that are not standard or not normal investment tools and because of that there's not a way for people to double check and say is the earnings that I'm getting really legitimate. So maybe they put $10,000 into the site and then they go back a couple weeks later and now they've got $50,000 and they're like wow this is really working but the whole thing is just a scam. The returns on your investments, the whole nine yards and so people put more money in and but it just shows up as a fake account balance so they think my goodness you know I'm going to make more money in a year than I made in 40 years of my life but it's all fiction. It's all fantasy and then when people try to take their money out that's when that sick feeling in their gut happens when they say oh my goodness I'm in trouble now. I've put in $50,000, $100,000, a quarter of a million dollars. I've heard of this happening in different reports and I don't want to happen to you so you know stick with the primary custodians, the Schwab's, the Fidelity, the Vanguard's, the well-known custodians and that's you know as a quick aside as a financial advisor for over 20 years for the part I like people having double verification of their accounts so when you're working with a financial advisor I think your account should likely be at not custody by the financial advisor but it should be custody at like a Schwab, a Fidelity, a Vanguard so that you're getting account statements from the custodian and then you're also getting your account statements from your financial advisor so that's the first one is what I'm calling social media hacks. The second one unfortunately are these phone scams, these text messages, these phone call spoofs where it looks like it's coming from our major bank you know wherever you're banking whatever the name of that firm is and most of us have nationally recognized banks. Many of us because it's so convenient have online banking set up now and where we really have to be careful is we the scam goes you know they send you a text, they give you a phone call, it shows up as from your bank and then they say you know what we have to identify that you are who we think you are so we're going to send you a five digit, a six digit, an eight digit code to your cell phone to verify that I'm speaking to the correct person the bank is saying this and that code is actually a code to access your bank account and the banks I think in the last six months have been gotten very good about saying do not share this code with anyone and it's super important that we follow that because unfortunately once you give that code away now people have access to your bank account and I was reading a report where a woman a retired woman lost her entire life savings and her bank said sorry you know there's nothing we can do we told you not to give this code to anybody so what do you do on the back of your your ATM card on the back of your credit cards are the legitimate phone numbers for your bank call the bank directly you know oftentimes these scams are set up you know somebody's using your your debit card and we've gotten four thousand dollars of unverified purchases and we want to protect your account so there's this sense of urgency you're lulled into thinking I need to act and I need to act now because I don't want somebody using my my ATM card my debit card but once you give that code away now you know that's like giving somebody your password unfortunately and unfortunately the banks have gotten very strict that they're not reimbursing people for these scams so not only is is it a a violation of you know our privacy but unfortunately it's also taking tens of thousands and for some people hundreds of thousands of dollars away from their account so that's the the second one the third one is probably not where you're going to lose your life savings but it's probably the most prevalent scam out there and in this one I was reading a report it was an interview with Frank Abagnale he was doing a seminar for the Nevada Banking Group and Frank Abagnale is not a household name but we all know him from the movie Catch Me If You Can with Leonardo da Vinci so that was Frank's story and and he talks about all of these different cons of course the movie focused on the big ones him pretending to be a surgeon him pretending to be an airline pilot but he was also a small-time scammer as well and one of the scams that he talks about is people picking up intercepting if you will physical copies of our checks so we write out a check and I know we don't do that often anymore most of us have online bill paying but maybe you know we have a relative an older relative and we're sending them a check and it's called check washing if you put these checks in the mail in your mailbox it's super easy for scammers to just you know drive up the neighborhood and see where the red flag is on the mailboxes and pick up these checks and then they can wash them they put scotch tape over your signature so your signature stays there but then they wash them with the commonly available chemical chemical and from there they can change who who the payee is who's who you know pay pay to the order of so instead of it being your your aunt emma it goes to john smith and he says and I have not verified this but I wanted to share it with you that there is a pen that's available at most office supply stores it's the uniball 207 uniball 207 pen and he says it's the only pen that he knows of that's resistant to this check washing so those are three scams that I want you to be aware of and I I also want you to be thinking about not what not just when we're saving our money for retirement but thinking about enjoying the journey up to retirement and that's why I made this video up here uh seven things to stop doing in your 50s and 60s to enjoy the journey more thanks for watching this video and I'll see you in this one bye bye