Beaver County woman loses $87,000 in phishing scam

BEAVER COUNTY, Pa. — Fraud cases involving the elderly are on the rise in Beaver County, according to police.

Channel 11 spoke with a victim who lost $87,000.

The local woman, who is in her 70s, agreed to talk with us if we didn’t identify her.

“I always thought I could never be a person who got scammed, and I was,” she said.

The victim told us she was checking her email when an Apple security alert appeared on her screen and froze her computer.

A phone number popped up, so she called it.

“They identified themselves by name and they were from Apple security and they were gonna help me through a process,” she said.

The scammers told the woman, her computer was captured by multinationals in the gambling and porn industry. And her banking information was comprised.

“Wow I was scared, like I knew I had a good bit of money in there, some saved,” she said.

To get her money back, she was told to withdraw money from several bank branches and deposit the cash into an account through a Bitcoin machine.

The men on the phone told her this was a federal government-funded program.

“The scammers and fraudsters are targeting those folks in that demographic range because they have the most money, they have a nest egg built up, they have a life savings,” Beaver Police Detective James Degori said.

Detective Degori investigates elder fraud cases, which he said are on the rise. He said the most common are phishing, romance and grandparent which all fall under social engineering scams.

And the scammers are typically out of the country. He advises seniors, “Don’t click on emails, don’t answer phone calls, don’t give your personal information out to anybody.”

Detective Degori is working to get the word out.

“Educating the community as best we can is the only way we can stop this. Because fraud and scams are so prevalent right now all across the county let alone western Pennsylvania,” he said.

Beaver police, along with the district attorney’s office, are holding a summer scam series for senior citizens, but all are invited.

The dates are Aug. 19 and Sept. 23 in the congregate room at Beaver Valley Mall from 8:30 to 9:30 a.m.

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