Scams

Forged home deeds	Magazine subscriptions
Cramming	Call from relative for help

Forged home deeds - House selling is a fast-growing and easy scam. Public records are easily available to search for the names of the owners and it is especially easy to search for homes owned by people living outside of the area, as well as homes that are not encumbered by a mortgage.
Once a property is located, a crook can complete a property transfer form, forge the signature of the "seller" and file the paperwork with the city or county office reponsible for real estate titles. Many localities do not even require identities to be authenticated, but even those that may check for identification may be given fake identification, stealing the real homeowner's identity.
With a newly issued deed, stolen homes are sold to an unsuspecting buyer or the homes are used as collateral for a new loan. As many seniors do not have mortgages, they become easy targets for this type of scam.

In order to try to protect yourself, you should consider the following:

From time to time, check the property records with the deed recording office where the property is located. This is especially true for vacation homes where you are an absentee owner.
If you receive a payment book in the mail, or a notice of a past due mortgage payment, for something you know nothing about, immediately advise the FBI as well as the company that sent the payment instruction.

Magazine subscription scams - You may be solicited, either by phone or by door-to-door sales, to accept a "FREE" magazine subscription asking that you only pay a "processing fee". The unscrupulous sellers may claim to be raising money for a charity, which is often not true.
Before agreeing to anything, you should ask a few questions, including:

What will my total actual cost be? If the salesperson will not answer this simple question, it is a sign the deal may be a scam.
What is the length of the subscription? You need to know the details of how often the publication is issued, how many issues you will receive and how you will be billed. You may find out the cost you will pay per issue is greater than the price you would pay at the newsstand, and this is what makes this a scam.
If you already subscribe and the salesperson is asking you to renew at a special rate, check the expiration date on your current subscription to make sure they are not trying to sell you a longer subscription well in advance of your expiration date

Cramming - It is important to carefully review your phone bill every month. A relatively new wave of scams effectively uses your phone as a credit card by allowing certain charges to be made to your phone bill. Unscrupulous merchants charge relatively small amounts to your phone bill, either your land-line or your cellphone, expecting the charge will be overlooked, imporperly thought of as an authorized expense or deemed too small to bother with. Once the charges start, they have a tendancy to grow and recur on a monthly basis. Another scheme is to ask for a response to a text message which is disguised as an actual order for some type of additional charge to your cellphone account for a game or something similar.

The most effective way to deal with this is to contact your phone carrier and ask them to block all third-party charges. The contacts for the major phone service providers are:

AT&T - 800-288-2747
Comcast - 800-266-2278
Qwest - 800-491-0118
Verizon - 800-837-4966

Call from relative for money - A current trend is for a call to be made to a grandparent from a "granchild" who claims to be travelling outside of the country and has gotten into trouble. A plea for money, together with a request to not tell the parents about the trouble, is made by a voice which does not sound quite right but explained as being a poor connection. The caller is willing to accept a credit card or a debit card to take care of the jam. Certainly a sympathetic grandparent will do what they can to help, but you can guess the rest of the story.

The caller is not the "grandchild" and the real grandchild may not even been travelling. By combing public records, information on the internet, etc., it is pretty easy to piece together information about a family and use this to build a profile that can make the information seem real. The caller can perfect a muffled sounding voice to cover the inability to make the voice sound accurate.