A 96-year-old Seal Beach, California, woman was scammed out of thousands of dollars—she believes by hypnosis—in one of the more recent online scams targeting the elderly.
Seal Beach police, last week, warned of a “significant uptick in financial scams and fraud crimes, primarily targeted at our senior citizen population,” and the elderly woman was one of the latest victims, according to a press release from officials.
According to authorities, she was scammed in April out of $6,000.
Wilmoth told KCAL news in an interview June 20 she was using her computer when a yellow blinking light took over her screen, and then a loud woman’s voice began shouting and telling her to keep it on.
“That’s all she said, ‘Do not turn off your computer. Do not turn off your computer,’” Wilmoth told the news outlet.
A phone number appeared on her screen which Wilmoth said she called, thinking that it could fix the apparent computer issue she thought she was experiencing.
In that phone call, a man on the other end of the line, whom she said had a soothing voice, convinced her to leave her home to purchase gift cards, she said.
The scammer first directed Wilmoth to a Kohl’s, where she attempted to purchase a $2,000 gift card but was denied because a store employee “recognized something wasn’t right,” the news outlet wrote in an online story.
After that failed, the scammer persuaded Wilmoth to purchase a $6,000 gift card at Lowe’s.
Wilmoth told KCAL she couldn’t comprehend what came over her, other than she must have been hypnotized.
“I couldn’t control myself,” she said. “I was hypnotized. I was doing exactly what he told me to do.”
Seal Beach Police did not return a request for comment for more details about Wilmoth’s case.
Authorities, however, warn that scammers create many scenarios to target their victims, including violent threats to make them feel intimidated, hopeless, and without options.
The most common forms of online scams are phone calls, text messages, emails, computer pop-up ads and through social media, police say.
Most popular scams, according to police, include scammers posing as imposters from the victim’s family, those from the Internal Revenue Service and Social Security, as well as lottery and sweepstake scams and those involving computer or tech support.
