Beware of scammers sending live couriers to liquidate victims’ life savings

Scammers are stepping up their game by sending couriers to the homes of elderly people and others as part of a ruse intended to rob them of their life savings, the FBI said in an advisory Monday.

“The FBI is warning the public about scammers instructing victims, many of whom are senior citizens, to liquidate their assets into cash and/or buy gold, silver, or other precious metals to protect their funds,” FBI officials with the agency’s Internet Crime Complaint Center said. “Criminals then arrange for couriers to meet the victims in person to pick up the cash or precious metals.”

The scammers pose as tech or customer support agents or government officials and sometimes use a multi-layered approach as they falsely claim they work on behalf of technology companies, financial institutions, or the US government. The scammers tell the targets they have been hacked or are at risk of being hacked and that their assets should be protected. The scammers then instruct the targets to liquidate assets into cash. In some cases, the scammers instruct targets to wire funds to a fake metal dealer who will ship purchased merchandise to the victims’ homes.

“Criminals then arrange for couriers to meet the victims in person to pick up the cash or precious metals,” Monday’s advisory warned.

Officials said that from May to December of last year, they tracked estimated aggregate losses topping $55 million from this sort of scam. More generally, the agency received 19,000 complaints of scams from January to June of 2023, with estimated victim losses of $542 million. Almost half of the victims were over 60 years old and accounted for 66 percent of the aggregated losses.

The types of scams included in Monday’s warning use tactics intended to coax the victim into developing trust and confidence in the perpetrators. The scammers promise to safeguard the assets in a protected account. In some cases, the scammers set a passcode with the target. If targets hand over money or other assets, they never hear from the scammers again.

Monday’s advisory comes four months after IC3 warned of an increase in complaints for what the agency calls “phantom hacker scams. This form of scam is an evolution of more traditional general tech ruses. They layer imposer tech support workers with workers from financial institutions and government agencies. Victims sometimes lose their entire holdings in bank, savings, retirement, or investment accounts.