FALLING PREY TO ‘GRANDMA SCAM’
90-year-old withdrew $10,000 to pay someone pretending to be her grandkid. The bank says it followed protocol to protect clients
At 90 years old, Elizabeth Mary Mahoney is active and resourceful.
Knee replacements haven’t slowed her down. She lives alone in her rented Toronto condo near High Park, takes long walks, rides the TTC and attends an aqua-fitness class twice a week.
Short-term memory can sometimes play tricks, but she participates in a book club, regularly goes to the theatre in Stratford and is involved in fighting the expansion of a nearby condo highrise.
Recently, to the consternation of her four children, she used various modes of public transit to visit friends in Guelph, where she spent the early part of her retirement. She worked for years as the librarian for a Sarnia chemical company, after earning a bachelor degree in chemistry and a master’s in library sciences.
She also does her own banking, a usually straightforward activity that on July 4 proved fateful — a scam cost her a large part of her savings.
Since then, she has tried — and failed — to get the Toronto-Dominion Bank to accept some responsibility, particularly since her $10,000 withdrawal was all cash.
Mahoney is a victim of the “grandmother scam,” one of several massmarketing swindles that, together, bilked Canadians over 60 of $20 million in 2017. The actual amount defrauded is far higher: the RCMP-led Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre estimates that only 5 per cent of victims notify the centre.
For Mahoney, it began with a morning phone call from someone claiming to be her 20-yearold grandson, Colin.
“He said he’d been in a car accident,” Mahoney recalls, sitting in the living room of her two-bedroom condo. The caller said the accident was his fault — he was looking at his phone — and he was being detained at a police station. He needed $9,500 in cash to go free.
The caller asked her to mail the bills to a Montreal-area address and pleaded with Mahoney to not tell his parents.
“I was sort of transfixed, you know — poor Colin,” Mahoney says. “Somehow he convinced me that he couldn’t get away from the (police) station until he had reimbursed the man for all the damage, which was highly implausible but …”
Jeff Thomson, acting manager of the anti-fraud centre, notes that “fraudsters are able to get a psychological hold on their victims. The victims feel a sense of urgency and panic so they just want to get it done, and they miss the red flags.” Mahoney walked to her TD branch in a “terrified” state.
“My head was buzzing,” she says.
She filled out a withdrawal slip for $10,000, leaving only $1,000 in her chequing account. The teller counted the bills — 98 x $100 and 10 x $20, according to the receipt — and handed over the cash.
As she was about to leave, Mahoney says the teller approached her with another bank official who politely asked, “What are you going to do with all that money?” Mahoney doesn’t remember her response, but a TD summary of the incident says she stated the funds were “for a family member and renovations.”
Bank officials then had Mahoney sign a “Standard Release of Liability” form, which clients are asked to sign whenever they withdraw large amounts. It states, in part, that they “have cautioned the undersigned that risks and dangers of loss, theft, personal injury and disappearance are obviously present when such a large amount of bank notes are delivered to an individual customer and taken away by a customer from the branch.”
The document also “discharges and releases forever” the TD Bank from any responsibility for theft, loss or any other mishap that might befall Mahoney with regards to the cash.
The form’s six clauses focus on protecting the bank from liability. They don’t mention the possibility of fraud or scams. Mahoney says the bank officials didn’t warn her of those risks, either.
She says she signed without reading it. “I was frightened and I thought, ‘I better get out of here or somebody will find out about Colin.’
Her chequing account is jointly held by her daughter, Susan, who was not contacted by bank officials about the withdrawal. The joint account allows Mahoney to make transactions with her signature alone. Once home, Mahoney put $9,500 in a large envelope and headed to the nearest FedEx office. At 3:57 p.m., according to the FedEx receipt, she paid $67 to have the package shipped overnight.
It was delivered at 9:22 the next morning to 3235 Boulevard de la Grande-Allée, Apt. 42, in Boisbriand, north of Montreal. It was signed for by “M. Marsha,” according to FedEx records.
That same day, shortly after the delivery, Mahoney got a second call from the person pretending to be her grandson. He wanted another $6,000 to compensate the accident victim for a broken watch. Mahoney declined, but still suspected nothing.
On July 6 she called Colin’s home. She wanted to insist he tell his parents about the accident. When a puzzled Colin came to the phone, Mahoney finally got it. “I was stupid,” Mahoney says. “No, Mom, you were compassionate and brave,” her daughter Susan, a producer at CBC Radio, assures her. “You were acting on the very best of intentions.” Mahoney went to the TD branch with another daughter the day she realized she’d been had. They hoped for compensation.
The facts — a distressed 90year-old on a fixed income virtually empties her account with a $10,000 withdrawal — should have raised enough red flags to stop a car race, Mahoney’s daughters insist.
They have spoken with five TD officials who assessed the case, including Becky Sagriff, manager of customer relations in the office of Bharat Masrani, CEO of the TD Bank Group. Much empathy was expressed, but no responsibility was taken, the family says.
The official response came in a July 24 letter to Mahoney by Alex Della Sciucca, a TD district vice-president. He notes employees asked Mahoney what the cash was for, “explained the risks of taking that amount of money out of the branch” and had her sign the liability release form.
TD has procedures to prevent fraud and trains employees to protect customers, the letter states. “However, it is also the responsibility of customers to provide us with accurate information,” Della Sciucca adds.
“I can confirm that the Branch followed instructions that were made by you to complete a cash withdrawal and we followed our protocol to confirm identify (sic) of the accountholder before the request was processed,” he says.
“I do understand that when questioned about the withdraw, (sic) you stated … that the funds were for a family member and renovations. Mrs. Mahoney, while I sympathize with your situation, please understand that the Bank cannot be held responsible for business dealings that we are not involved in.
“I would recommend that you contact the local authorities to report this incident. Based on the reasons above, the Bank will not be reimbursing you for the requested $9,500” that was withdrawn and sent to a third party.
Questioned by the Star, TD’s senior manager for corporate and public affairs, Carly Libman, forwarded a statement that added, in part: “Our colleagues are trained to look for signs of fraud, and in this situation our Customer Service Representative had concerns about the request and escalated it to their manager.
“They then took care to ask questions about the purpose of the transaction, review alternative options that would be more secure than cash (a wire transfer, for example), and then discussed the risks of a large cash withdrawal.”
The bank did not respond to questions about what protocols are in place to prevent seniors from being swindled, or whether the bank has a campaign that informs older clients about financial scams.
Aaron Boles, spokesperson for the Canadian Bankers Association, says his group provides free seminars to thousands of seniors on protecting their money from fraud. He adds that bank staff “are trained to notice when a customer makes an unusual transaction,” but owners of accounts are ultimately responsible for their withdrawals.
He added in a statement that “banks must strike an appropriate balance between helping to prevent fraud and protecting the rights of their clients to access their money.”
Mahoney’s daughters insist that in all their contacts with TD, bank officials never once said their mother was warned about the possibility of fraud or scams. They have asked TD’s ombudsman to review the case.
In the U.S., a branch of the Unity National Bank in Ohio trains its tellers, when they suspect fraud, to give clients a flyer that describes the four top scams. One involves “fraudsters (who) pretend to be a grandchild in financial trouble and ask for money to be wired.”
Mahoney says if bank employees had shown her a similar flyer “it would have clicked right away” that she was being scammed.
The anti-fraud centre’s Thomson, who is also an intelligence analyst with the RCMP, says financial institutions have taken steps to prevent mass-marketing fraud, but adds it’s fair to ask, “Are they really doing enough?”
Institutions are increasingly being held accountable. In the U.S., Western Union agreed to pay back $586 million to its clients this year after the Federal Trade Commission accused the company of not doing enough to protect people from fraud, including grandparent scams like Mahoney’s.
CARP, formerly known as the Canadian Association of Retired Persons, has been pushing banks to include a “trusted contact” on accounts, a person who can be called if tellers suspect fraud. Privacy legislation is currently blocking that initiative from wide adoption, says CARP’s chief advocacy officer, Wanda Morris.
Police teams with a mandate to tackle mass-marketing fraud were set up in Montreal, Toronto, Alberta and B.C., in the late 1990s. But it’s not unusual for other crime-fighting priorities to take resources away from those teams, Thomson says.
When Mahoney called Toronto police in early July to report the fraud, police never came to interview her, she said. She then wrote a letter dated Aug. 17 to the superintendent of 11 Division, noting the scam and the police no-show. She has yet to hear back, despite what Thomson calls the “tangible information” of the exact address where the money was delivered. Thomson says Mahoney received the scam phone call because she is likely on a list of potential targets shared by fraudsters. He warned of more calls to come.
Indeed, during the Star interview, Mahoney got a call saying she had won a $2.2-million prize. Her daughter Susan, who answered the phone, ended the conversation before the inevitable request for money.
The experience has been painful for Mahoney.
And telling friends she was duped is embarrassing.
Still, she wants to alert others to the danger: “When the phone rings, be careful.”