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Protecting Parents with Terri Proctor

Easy Prey
“We can always get advice but the thing I kept hearing was that my mother was a willing participant, instead of it being that she was a victim of a crime.” - Terri Proctor Share on X

Sometimes people only share their stories after they’ve gone through a challenging time. But it’s also important to learn from those in the middle of a scam to learn how people are manipulated and how vulnerable our loved ones can really be.

Today’s guest is Terri Proctor. Terri’s elderly mother has been scammed by romance scammers over the last three years. In trying to get help from different recommended services, she realized that no one was really interested in helping. She started the non-profit Stop Elderly Scams to educate and bring awareness to the community.

“I would read stories online and see the comments about people who have been scammed. They are called stupid and dumb, but it’s impossible to know what they’ve been through.” - Terri Proctor Share on X

Show Notes:

“If you can take out the anger and frustration, it can help your relationship with the loved one that is being scammed.” - Terri Proctor Share on X

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Transcript:

Terri, thank you so much for coming on the Easy Prey Podcast today.

Thank you. I'm excited to be here.

I'm glad you're here. Can you give myself and the audience a little bit of background about who you are and what you do?

My name's Terri Proctor. I am the founder of a nonprofit called Stop Elderly Scams. Three years ago, I was thrown into a situation by my elderly mother who loves social media. She was going on Facebook and posting all these nice little sayings and everything and to her friends.

Then, all of a sudden, we hear about an oil rig boyfriend and we're like, “What is happening?” I thought they were just friends there. For some reason, she was sending gift cards for a birthday present of $300. When I grew up with my mother, I would get like a $20 check from my mother, maybe $50 at Christmas time. It was a red flag to me when I heard $300 for someone's birthday.

For some reason, she was sending gift cards for a birthday present of $300. When I grew up with my mother, I would get like a $20 check from my mother, maybe $50 at Christmas time. It was a red flag to me when I heard $300 for… Share on X

We kept hearing stories and she was open to it, talking about this person, James, and how he wanted to marry her and all these things. It was just hard to understand. We thought it was going to pass, and she did get upset with that person for whatever reason.

But then another oil rigger popped up named Michael Smith—the names are always very common—and this one got really serious. She lost, I would say, probably $100,000 to this person in a year. During that time, I was going to different places trying to find an answer—“What should I do?” I kept getting advice and I would go maybe to the police force and they would tell me stories about how they had dealt with it and said there was really nothing they could do. I talked to friends, family, and you always get advice.

The one thing I kept hearing was she's a willing participant, instead of it being that she was a victim of a crime, which she is to me. I tried to go along with it, and I think in the beginning, I didn't handle it as well as I should because I really didn't understand it, and I was angry, and I was frustrated with my mother.

The one thing I kept hearing was she's a willing participant, instead of it being that she was a victim of a crime, which she is to me. -Terri Proctor Share on X

Instead of trying to maybe listen and reason, I went down a different route. I guess about a year-and-a-half in, I decided to change my outlook toward her. It didn't really help, but we're going on three years now that she's been doing this. One might disappear, but then another one will always pop up.

I feel like it's a boiler room or something where they're all cold calling and texting all day, these people. In my mother's case, she was very lonely. She lives by herself—she's a widow—in a single-family home, so her fun was going on Facebook. I think she started looking forward to the texts she would get from them. That was her day. They would call her babe and honey and tell her they love her and all these things.

It's hard for friends and family if you're working to give that attention to someone, and she was getting it like all day long. She wakes up looking forward to it. That's how I started and here I am.

I know one of the things that I often hear from people is that people are targeted during specifically emotional times in their life, where a spouse passes away, there's an illness that happens where a friend passes away. Was there any of that happening in her life or was it just kind of she just met people online?

It was. My father passed away probably six years before, but as she's gotten older, a lot of friends have passed away. She does talk about that a lot. I think they offered her a new life saying, “I'm going to marry you. I have children. We're going to have a family together.” It was this fantasy of, “I'll be with a family again. I won't be lonely.”

I think they offered her a new life saying, “I'm going to marry you. I have children. We're going to have a family together.” It was this fantasy of, “I'll be with a family again. I won't be lonely.” -Terri Proctor Share on X

To anyone, I think that would look good, and she does have cognitive decline. She's a little more gullible to things. I think in her generation—she's in her 80s—you trusted people. You didn't think people were out to harm you in any way. I heard stories.

She would tell me that I didn't realize this, but they would say they needed a flight home. But she would go buy an Apple gift card. I go, “But Apple gift cards do not purchase airline tickets,” and she still won't believe me on those things.

The lengths she would go to—she put $10,000 in cash in the middle of a magazine and mailed that somewhere in the US. They're very good at manipulating and it continues on. It's a big fight, honestly, but I'm still doing it today.

That's challenging that you're still in the midst of it. It's still fresh in your mind. This is not “how we finally got it resolved. The bad guy is in jail and mom's doing great,” but she's still in the middle of this?

Yes, I just had to go and visit her because they were trying to talk her into taking out a $7,000 personal loan. She had already taken out three of them in the past year. That's another frustration. Why would you give an elderly woman a loan with 40% interest rate? Two of them: one had 60% and another had 70% interest rate. You're always dodging all these different people taking advantage. It's still going on.

One of the reasons, I would read stories online and I would look at the comments that people would say about the people that were scammed. It was so sad to me because they would go on about how stupid and dumb they were for being taken. But it's hard to know the situation someone's in when they don't have a lot of people to talk to, and here's someone telling them things they want to believe.

A lot of these things are, it's not like someone showed up at their front door and said, “Hey, give me $10,000.” Those are easy to recognize. This is something that has been built up. “I've known this person for months,” or, “I've known them for a year. Of course, I would help a friend out. Wouldn't you?”

Exactly. They will never FaceTime the person and I'm like, “Isn't that odd to you that you've never seen this person?” Because even growing up, it was don't talk to strangers. And here you are. You're involved with someone you've never seen before, and you're believing everything they say.

The latest one, I don't know, somehow they're generals now in the US Army. It's really sad that this person would say, “I'm going to come to your house,” and he would promise. At one point, she made dinner, she made a huge amount of spaghetti, because he and his two children were coming. She told the neighbor about it. She put makeup on, she got all dressed up, and they just play these games with her on a daily basis. It's really sad.

Stop Elderly Scams, I'm hoping to get the word out there so that people will talk about it because I feel like people get embarrassed that they're taken advantage of. I've had people email me and I say just talk to your parents about it and maybe let them be advocates for others and say, “This is what happened to me,” so that they feel like they're doing something instead of being scammed.

I think that's one of the big challenges is the embarrassment and the shame that people feel if and when they realized that it's a scam, that they don't want to say anything about it because they feel ashamed about what happened or like, “Gosh, I can't believe that I did this,” but that lack of discussion, that conversation could save other people from the same thing.

Yes. I started researching the statistics and they say people over 60 in 2023, they estimated they lost $3.4 billion. Imagine that's an estimation because a lot of people don't talk about it.

It's got to be a lot higher than that.

That's what I think as well. I also think about the elderly people that I read stories where they lose their life savings. Are they not having to go on Medicaid, and how is it affecting our country because of that? It's a situation that somehow needs to be addressed, so I'm hoping we figure something out in the future.

I think it's one of those things that we're still in the process of trying to figure out how to prevent this. How do we minimize it? How to reduce it? How do we have an impact in this space?

Yes. I agree.

Earlier on, you said you had tried one particular route of interaction with your mom and that didn't work, so you pivoted to something else. What was it that you were trying that didn't work?

I think it was the anger and frustration I had. I was projecting it to her because, in my mind, I'm like, “Why can't you see what everyone else is seeing?” She went through five different banks that she was kicked out of because they don't want the liability. Friends, family, and people stopped talking to her, neighbors. It's just hard to understand that.

What I'm trying to do now is just to listen and try and reason. Sometimes it just doesn't work. She came to me a couple of weeks ago saying that she was going to withdraw $2,000 because she was buying an investment property with this person that she'd never seen before. That day, I was just like, “OK.” I just didn't want to fight with her about it because the desperation sometimes is so overwhelming for her that she gets a lot of anxiety and she has to do it. I think if you can take out the anger and the frustration, it helps. It really helps the relationship with the family or friend that is going through that.

I think the scammers know that that's one of those things that family and friends potentially respond with, and they use that to further isolate and to further manipulate the person.

Yes, and I've actually seen their texts talking badly about me, the scammers to my mother. I do understand what's going on and that's why I try to remain positive, but it's not always so easy because you don't want your loved one to be taken advantage of all the time. Some neighbors are very willing to stand by her and then others, they just don't want a part of it anymore. That's kind of sad.

That unfortunately makes it even worse because the more isolated the person gets, the more manipulated they can be and the less awareness from the outside of what's really going on in their life.

Yes. I have to admit there is one financial institution that hasn't kicked her out. They're very frustrated, but they've been understanding because they understand what's going on. I was even at a grocery store the last time I went to see my mother and the manager had caught onto her coming in to buy gift cards and would not allow her to buy gift cards there anymore.

Way to go, manager.

Right? You don't hear that. I went in and I went to thank the woman and she said she's not the only one that comes in here doing that. I always say to them if you received it from a text or an email to come get this gift card, you cannot buy it here. She told me she called other stores, letting them know that this person might come in looking to buy gift cards. There are some people that are onto it and are looking out for people.

I've heard that convenience stores across the street and nearby retirement homes specifically, the people at the counter have been trained to ask questions about people coming from the retirement home coming in and wanting to buy gift cards. “Did someone tell you to buy this gift card? Who was it? How do you know them?”

The scammers will often tell them to lie and say other things. But it's encouraging to hear that there's somebody at a local store saying, “I see that there's a problem. I'm going to do something that's not necessarily in my store's best interest, but I know it's in the interest of society that I can help. I'm sorry. I can't activate this card today. I don't know what's going on.”

No, it's hard to find people like that. When you do, it's a positive thing that happened to me today.

That's really challenging. I wonder how much of this is a result of this kind of isolation and how can we, as children and grandchildren, help our family members not be isolated to see if that helps reduce it?

I was hoping at this point in her life that she might be considered an independent living. Because I think the thing is she lives in a single-family home by herself. She can no longer drive. It's not like she can go out and see people.

I, myself, live in a high rise in a city. If I go in the elevator, I see people so I don't get lonely, but she keeps thinking these people are going to come, so she's so against going to a place where she could sit and play cards or play games of some sort. It is hard for family and friends to be around all the time because they're working and they have other things going on. I even thought about hiring someone to text her every day like a dog sitter or something to give her attention.

That would be an interesting service to offer. We’ve got to do really good back background checks on those people.

That's true.

“We will check in on your relatives and interact with them and be their friend.”

Yes, because there are so many people that need that.

I see a challenge. At some point, I think we need to talk to our parents and our grandparents about these possibilities of what these things could be, but I'd like to say, what can the elderly do to protect themselves? But I think once it gets past a certain point, I don't know that that's possible in a sense.

No, I agree. That's not the only scam that she's been involved in. It was like one of those prize scams where she was going to win a million dollars, and they sent her these fake checks. I saw a picture of the checks, and they looked very real to me. She took them to the bank to try and cash $10,000 worth of checks. I alerted the bank to let them know what was going on so they didn't cash them.

There are just so many different things going on as far as scams that it's hard to keep up, and it's hard to advise people on a daily basis of what's out there.

I'd love to ask you about it without revealing the name of the financial institution, because I don't know if that's necessarily appropriate. You said there was one bank that hadn't kicked her out. It sounds like they're working with you to help her. Is it just because it's a branch manager that is understanding? How has that developed? Because I think that's really interesting that you have a bank that's really doing what it can to help her out and working with you at the same time.

I think that they take a different attitude than the other banks. They want their customers, and they want to protect them. You are right. They are working with me and trying to help out because it's a hard situation. She gets kicked out of a bank and you have to start all over with the online banking, the debit cards, and everything.

I've sat down with them and I said if I know that some type of scam is going to happen, I let them know. They've been very nice. Very nice, I have to say.

That's really good. I think I've told this story once or twice on the podcast, and I'll tell it again, and if I've told it too many times, people will let me know. My wife is not from the US, and culturally, you help support your family, and you send money to your family once in a while.

The local bank that I had been using didn't support international fund transfers, which was interesting. Maybe that's a route to go. I had to open up an account with one of the big banks that I knew would have international transferability. I went in, deposited some money, made sure you got it.

No bank will ever let you wire money out within seconds of it showing up, so I let it sit there for a week and then wired most of it overseas. The next day, I got a call from the bank saying, “Hey, this is so-and-so with the bank. I've got a couple of questions about your wire transfer. Who are you sending the money to? Why are you sending it? Are you sure that you're really talking to that person?”

I was both annoyed and encouraged at the same time. It was a lot of friction and it was annoying to have the conversation, but the podcast host Chris Parker was going, “Oh, this is awesome.” The behavior had all the warning signs of somebody being scammed. It was really neat to see them do everything that they could.

“Are you sure that it's not someone else pretending to be the individual? Have you met them in person? Do you know for sure that you're actually dealing with them? How are you communicating with them?”

It was really neat to see how far they went above and beyond to try to prevent what appeared—and rightly so appeared—to be a scam on their part, but it sounds like, unfortunately, your mom has not had the best luck with banks or they’re just like, “We're going to wash our hands. We're going to close the account, and we don't even want to risk this.”

She did have her money invested, and I have to say that her financial advisor, he tried his best and they even put something on our account, an alert saying that she was being scammed, and they would not let her take out large amounts. But I'm assuming that she was coached and told to keep calling and to call his boss. She kept doing it until finally they said, “OK, take your money out.”

As soon as she did that, that's when she lost a large amount of money because they could no longer help us and oversee it. The local bank she's working with, I have to say, is a small bank, and I think that that's part of it, because sometimes bigger banks don't have the capacity to look after everyone's account like that.

A local bank has that person, they have their business operated differently. They have a personal touch with what they do as opposed to, “We're just this financial institution, and here's the rules.” The little bank wants to know who their customers are. They want to have that relationship with them.

I agree.

What are some of the things you think that we can do to help our parents and grandparents, but not in a way that doesn't take away their independence or challenge their independence? I hear that over and over again from people of like, “As soon as mom thought I was trying to put her in a facility or to take over her bank accounts, that was the tripping point for the scammer to start taking advantage of her because then she's like, ‘This is proof that what Bob said is true. You really don't love me. You really don't trust me.’”

I guess it's just to start having conversations, telling stories of other people who are being scammed. If they think something's off, then maybe they'll come to you instead of being afraid to talk about it. -Terri Proctor Share on X

“I've heard that you're trying to control me. You're trying to take away all my freedom.” I guess it's just to start having conversations, telling stories of other people who are being scammed. If they think something's off, then maybe they'll come to you instead of being afraid to talk about it.

Because I think even us, if something happens and we're embarrassed about it, we don't want to tell people. Imagine you're getting older and you know that maybe your mind's not all there and people will judge you in a certain way. I think just having it as part of the conversation saying, “Look at this person. This happened to them.” Because it's out there, it's going to happen to everyone, I think.

“Hey, mom. Hey, dad. I saw this news story about this situation. Gosh, isn't that crazy?”

Yes, I agree.

“Isn't that sad?”

Yeah, something like that, I think, because there are plenty of stories to tell.

Is that something that you're doing with Stop Elderly Scams, is just trying to tell people's stories or are you trying to change the legislation? What is the approach you are taking?

I launched my website, stopelderlyscams.com in March. What I'm really trying to do is educate and communicate. Basically, I have a newsletter. I tell different stories every month of my experience. Or I've had people email me their experiences with dating sites, different things. I want people to feel free to talk about it and to come to me.

I'm hoping in the future when my nonprofit gets very large, that I'll be able to give back to some of these people because they lose their life savings, maybe $20,000 was all they had, and I'd love to be able to help those people get back on their feet.

That's a great approach. I'm super proud, and I'm super excited when I hear people be like, “I want to make a difference. I want to figure out a way to intervene.” It's not just about you and your mom, but, “How can I help prevent this from happening to other people and raise awareness?”

That's the reason the podcast exists: to raise awareness. I don't necessarily expect your mom to be listening to the podcast. But I think it's for those of us whose parents are aging, that we need to be aware of these things and start talking about it in a way that's not threatening to them and not taking away their independence.

There's a fine line there.

I remember when my grandfather got to the point where he couldn't drive anymore. They still have the car and it was still there. He knew he wasn't supposed to drive, but at some point he had some cognitive decline and got it in his mind that he needed to go move the car. He went out and moved the car and nothing happened.

But we were like, “OK, how do we get the car key off of his keychain without him knowing?” I remember this discussion on, in my mind, I seem to remember this happening around Christmas and like, “Can we get the key chain off?” He only had a pocket knife on his keychain. “Can we ask to use his pocket knife and take the car key away?” But he knows the car key is there or not there.

“Can we replace it with a different key? Can we file something down on the keys so the car won't start?” We knew it wasn't safe for him to drive. But on the other hand, we didn't want to cause him stress at the same time. It was a challenging process to try to figure out.

I went through that too. The thing that finally helped was my mother went to a neurologist and they sent her to a simulator to drive. In the simulator, she actually hit a police car, so she realized, “Maybe it's time I stop driving.”

That is a very clever way to go around it because ultimately it was her decision to stop driving, not, “I'm taking away your keys because I've decided you can't drive.”

Yeah, but thank goodness for the driving companies. I can order a car for her. I thought that would solve the situation with the scammers, but they seem to be sending her information. She hired a limo service and paid $100 to run errands. Things keep popping up. When you think you've solved one problem, another one comes up, so I'm learning a lot. I'll say that much.

The challenging thing I've definitely heard from people who've done research into the scammer organizations is once they know that they can take advantage of somebody, even if they're done with their scam, they pass that person's information off to somebody else.

“OK, we got them on the investment scam. Let's get them on a utility scam or a romance scam. We're going to just change our tactics to try to get something else out of them.”

No, even myself, I have been to the doctor recently, and in the last couple of days, I keep getting this text from a laboratory saying, “You need to pay your bill.” I'm like, “That's odd.” I look up the name of the company and there's no such company. It's not just the elderly parent. They're after people every day. I'll say to people that email me, “Just research who the email comes from before you respond if you think something is off.”

It's not just the elderly parent. They're after people every day. I'll say to people that email me, “Just research who the email comes from before you respond if you think something is off.” -Terri Proctor Share on X

I get that too. At one point, I was taking the scam calls because I was curious about what's the scam? What are they trying to do? How are they working? Life gets busy, and I don't have time for that. I don't want to be associated with my personal phone number, so I would turn on the iPhone and Android. If the telephone number is not in the address book, it goes straight to voicemail.

That's great until you need to go see a new doctor or you have somebody coming over to your house to do work and you check the voicemail and it's like, “Hey, I was waiting outside your front door for 15 minutes, but you didn't answer my phone call, so I left.”

Right. That's true.

It definitely gets challenging. I super, super appreciate you coming on the podcast today. The website is stopelderlyscams.com. I hope you just have some great luck with getting traction and really being able to have an impact in your community. Is there any other parting advice that you have for the audience today?

Just communicate with your friends and family. There are a lot of lonely people out there, unfortunately. Just encourage them to get out and do things. Go to dinner. Just those little things make a big difference in people's lives,… Share on X

Just communicate with your friends and family. There are a lot of lonely people out there, unfortunately. Just encourage them to get out and do things. Go to dinner. Just those little things make a big difference in people's lives, I believe.

I love it, and it helps protect them from that isolation.

For sure.

Terri, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today.

Thank you, Chris.

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