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Getty Images | Sean Gallup


HOW TO KEEP YOURSELF OR A LOVED ONE FROM LANDING ON A ‘SUCKERS LIST’ FOR SCAMS

This is important information.

August 7, 2018August 7, 2018 by CNN

Kip Koelsch saw the hundreds of pieces of mail arriving at his father’s home
every week. But it wasn’t until the 84-year-old called him saying he’d won a
Mercedes and a million dollars that he really began to worry.

His father soon admitted that he had already sent $3,000 in cash to pay taxes or
“processing fees” for various prizes he believed he had won. His checkbook
revealed that he had written more than 3,000 checks totaling more than $10,000 a
year for several years to hundreds of different organizations. Many appeared to
be flat-out scams; others, Koelsch said, were questionable charities and
political groups using scare tactics to solicit funds.

How did so many scammers from around the world find this one elderly man?

As Koelsch soon found out, his father had ended up on a “suckers list.”



Getty Images/CNN




WHAT IS A SUCKER’S LIST?

In the shadowy world of mail fraud, suckers lists are an essential commodity.
The names, addresses and other personal information they contain are bought and
sold over and over again.

Companies that sell personal information to marketers, charities and other
organizations that want to solicit consumers are known as data and list brokers.
They make up a multibillion dollar industry. Most of these firms profess to
ensure that their mailing lists don’t end up with criminals. But government
investigators are targeting an underworld of companies and individuals willing
to provide this valuable information to scammers.

Ending up on a suckers list can begin with an innocent transaction, like a
charity donation or a purchase from a mail-order catalog. If the organization
you’re connecting with knowingly or unintentionally sells this information to an
unscrupulous data broker, your personal information can then be sold to
criminals.

When someone falls for a scam letter, their name is likely to end up on other
suckers lists broken down into categories like sweepstakes lovers, opportunity
seekers and highly responsive buyers. Scammers target specific types of victims
who might be drawn to their schemes, as well as elderly consumers often
suffering from diseases like dementia.



Flickr | miss karen



In the case of one of the longest-running scams in history, for example, court
documents show how one list broker helped enable a vicious cycle of fraud.

According to prosecutors, 56-year-old Connecticut resident Daniel Arnold would
locate mailing lists containing information on thousands of consumers and
provide these on a monthly basis to the operators of a scam involving letters
supposedly written by the French psychic Maria Duval. These letters promised
recipients that the clairvoyant could help them battle health issues, win money
and find love — as long as they continued to send in payments of around $40.

Arnold often acquired these lists from other fraudsters and operations whose
lists he knew would be “good sources of recipients or victims,” a government
attorney said in court.

At the end of each month, Arnold would receive a list of victims who had sent in
money in response to the letters, the government alleges. He would then share
these names and addresses with more fraudsters — and his company would receive a
commission based on the number of contacts he provided. In February, Arnold pled
guilty to conspiracy to commit mail fraud and is awaiting sentencing. His
attorneys did not respond to a request for comment.


HOW TO MAKE IT STOP

Once a name has made it onto a scammer’s list, it’s almost impossible to get it
off. But there are ways to limit these solicitations and stay off future lists.



Adobe



Get on an anti-suckers list: The Data & Marketing Association (DMA), an industry
trade group with more than 1,000 members, offers a service called DMAchoice that
allows users to remove their names from the mailing lists maintained by these
members. The organization also fields ethics complaints about any members who
may have sent misleading or deceptive mailings.

Opt out directly with data brokers: The nonprofit World Privacy Forum provides a
list of data brokers that allow people to opt out of the use of their
information — including online links for making these requests to get personal
information removed from their records (though some links may be outdated), as
well as a guide to the top 10 most useful opt-outs. And for those dealing with
persistent junk mail, the nonprofit also recommends the paid service DeleteMe
(to which it has no affiliation) which will do the work for you — handling opt
outs with more than a dozen data brokers for a fee. It also provides a free
opt-out tutorial for those who don’t wish to invest in the paid service.

Find out who sells donor info: Before giving money to a charity, ask the
organization whether it trades or sells donor information. If money has already
been donated, contact the charity directly to get removed from any lists being
shared.

Report flat-out scams: Any solicitations that appear to be scams should be
reported to a state attorney general or the Federal Trade Commission.

Even these steps sometimes fail to deter the worst scammers, prompting some
people to get creative.

One woman said she tried everything she could before resorting to simply getting
to the mailbox before her mother could. She even set her mother’s clock behind a
couple hours so she would think the mailman was coming later.

Others have tried returning the mail, marked “REFUSED” or “RETURN TO SENDER,”
with the hope that the scammers wouldn’t waste the cost of postage in the
future.

Some trying to protect their loved ones from scammers have found it effective to
have all the mail forwarded to them for screening.

After becoming his father’s power of attorney and getting added to his bank
accounts to monitor all outgoing checks, Koelsch took the extreme step of moving
his father and only notifying banks and other important senders of mail of the
change of address. He then forwarded all other mail to his own home instead to
tackle the problem himself.

Since then, he said he and his wife have spent hundreds of hours battling this
junk mail.

They created a spreadsheet of nearly 800 entities that had been sending his
father mail and demanded that he be removed him from their lists. They contacted
these groups by phone, email and Facebook messaging.

While it took “a lot of internet legwork” to track down contact information for
the more nefarious of these groups, Koelsch and his wife did sometimes succeed,
perhaps because the scammers they reached were trying to stay off the radar of
authorities.

The mailings haven’t subsided completely, but the flood has slowed from 100 to
200 solicitations a day to about six. They still make the occasional call with
the hope of stopping them all one day.

Written by Blake Ellis and Melanie Hicken for CNN Investigates.

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2018 Cable News Network, Inc., a Time Warner Company. All rights reserved.

Categories Money, News, Technology, Tips & Advice




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