Postal inspectors, FTC launch effort to prevent senior fraud

WASHINGTON -- The stories are always slightly different but basically are the same:

Louis Johnson Jr. had won an enticing prize, and all he had to do to collect was pay a processing fee. Susanne Conley-Higgins noticed her mother suddenly was buying and mailing a lot of money orders.

Mail and telemarketing fraud are up 27 percent this year,the U.S. Postal Inspection Service said Monday as it began a campaign to alert the public to the growing danger of being swindled.

Postal inspector Lee Heath said a shaky economy entices people to look for different ways to invest their money, and too often they find fraudsters out there "just waiting."

Last year Heath's office handled 66,000 fraud complaints. At the rate they are coming in this year, the total could top 80,000, he said.

The National Consumers League estimated that illegal telemarketing costs Americans $40 billion annually.

So the Postal Inspection Service is putting up posters in the 38,000 post offices, is mailing post cards to more than 3 million homes in areas where large populations of the elderly live and is launching a media campaign featuring actress Betty White.

The campaign is focusing on senior citizens because they are often a prime target of these schemes, which "really makes me angry," said Conley-Higgins of Portland, Maine.

Her elderly mother doesn't drive, and when Conley-Higgins took her to the store she noticed that her mother was buying a lot of money orders and mailing them off.

When she asked, her mother said she was sending for things because that would help her win lotteries and sweepstakes. It took a pair of postal inspectors to explain that wasn't true, Conley-Higgins said.

For Johnson, of Orange, N.J., the offer came from Canada, announcing that he had won one of four prizes. All he had to do was send $199 for the cost of processing the winnings across the border.

When nothing arrived, he called the Better Business Bureau, which contacted postal inspectors. The U.S. inspectors worked with Canadian postal officials, and Johnson got his money back.