CHARLESTON, W.Va – Leadership in West Virginia is speaking out in support of the Never EVER campaign, an effort launched last week by the federal Department of Health and Human Services to promote awareness of government and business imposter scams.
HHS announced the campaign in partnership with its new Federal Elder Justice Action Plan, which is a government-wide strategy to “protect older Americans’ rights, strengthen accountability, and make help easier to find.”
“Elder fraud costs West Virginia seniors about $19 million a year, and these government impostor efforts and scams cost us about $1.1 (million), so it’s very, very real, and anyone is a target, quite frankly,” Moore Capito, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of West Virginia, said on MetroNews Talkline.
The action plan is produced by the federal Elder Justice Coordinating Council, a cross-agency body designed to advance elder justice and protect some of the nation’s most vulnerable people. Capito believes that developing educational tools is the right way to combat this kind of fraud.
“Any time anybody has any of this, you call our office, and we will work to put these people where they deserve and that’s in prison, but we can’t always catch them, so we believe that education is probably the best way to combat these things on the front end,” he said.
Many of the scams being perpetrated originate outside the United States, and improvements in artificial intelligence and other technology have made them harder to figure out. Capito wants people to know just how deep the fraud can go.
“The key to these scams are the sense of urgency; the sense of now—you have to act right now or something bad is going to happen—and with the advances of AI, quite frankly, someone could be calling from a foreign country and using a voice substitution that makes them sound like they’re from Boone County,” he said.
Capito said one of the most simple ways to avoid these kinds of scams is to never give out personally identifying information to a solicitor. Many of these schemes rely on fraudsters obtaining information like social security numbers.
“Any time that somebody is requesting information from you, especially personally identifiable information, or ‘PII’ as we refer to it—so name, birthday, social security number. You never, ever want to provide those to a solicitation,” he said.
The National Elder Fraud Hotline is available at 833-FRAUD-11.