Banks Working With Telemarketers to Rob Old People
This is one of the saddest and most ridiculous things I’ve ever come across. If you are elderly, or have an elderly parent, be very careful of contests, surveys, telemarketers or anybody looking to obtain any information. Of course, most of us hang up on people who interrupt our dinner to try and re-finance our home, even if we don’t own a home. But many lonely elderly people don’t have anybody to talk to and this is part of why telemarketers are preying on them more and more.
It would be one thing if it was a simple matter of legitimate telemarketers buying lists of old people, calling them, and selling them crap they don’t need. All things considered, that’s nothing compared to some of the things going on according to this article in the NY Times.
At the heart of this story is a company called InfoUSA who collects data on individuals, often times through contests or marketing surveys and sells the information to telemarketers. One of these lists is actually called “Suffering Seniors” and includes a list of 4.7 million people with Alzheimer’s disease or cancer.
Also included in this story is the role America’s 4th largest bank, Wachovia has played in all this. Wachovia has also been involved in selling seniors information to criminal telemarketers in foreign countries.
The ultimate aim of these criminal telemarketers is to con old people into giving them their social security numbers or personal information so that they can gain access to their bank accounts and milk them dry. So yeah, it’s much more than just selling them magazines they don’t need, it’s despicable robbery that involves “legitimate” companies.
3 Comments
And you can back up this allegation, how?
I read and re-read this article. There certainly are opinions here … but where are the facts? Let’s see FACTS first; crap opinions second!
This is not an allegation that was spun by me out of thin air. This is based on a 4 page article in the NY Times that was well researched by them. I included the link to that article and my post was a summation of that article. So yes there are facts here and I have already backed them up, it’s not just crap opinions as you put it. Thanks though! Maybe you yourself enjoy stealing from old people, who knows…