Couple gets swindled out of $7,500 in ‘grandparents scam’

DANBURY — Elaine and Joseph Lyons got an early morning call from who they thought was their 25-year-old grandson.

The caller said he was in jail after a car crash in Maryland with a woman who was 32-weeks pregnant.

He told the grandparents to call the lawyer whose name and number he provided. Worried, the couple spent the day on the phone with the so-called attorney, who claimed their grandson could face manslaughter charges if the woman lost her baby.

“It was very scary,” said Elaine, 79. “We would do anything to help our children or grandchildren.”

But the caller was not their grandson and the lawyer doesn’t appear to be a lawyer. The two Danbury residents are now out $7,500 after handing the sum in cash to a courier who came to their house for the bail money.

The two fell victim to what is known as the “grandparents scam,” where callers pretend to be a relative in need of help and money. Senior citizens are often the targets of these scams, according to the state attorney general’s office.

What happened to the Lyons was not an isolated incident.

“It seems to be pretty prevalent in Danbury lately,” said Frank Giannone, founder of Danbury Bail Bonds, who the Lyonses called after suspecting they had been scammed.

He said this is the second time in the last eight weeks that someone has called him after being scammed this way. The first time, he said, the Maryland victim was told a similar story about her relative being in a crash with a pregnant woman, and to wrap cash in a magazine and mail it to a Danbury address.

Giannone said he contacted Danbury police hoping they could catch the scammer at the address as the money was in route.

The department has caught scammers this way before, Danbury Police Det. Len LaBonia said. He said the grandparent scam is common and that police arrested someone involved about a month or two ago.

LaBonia said he has seen a dramatic increase in scams like this and others involving bank or credit card fraud since he started working in the department’s white collar crime unit in 2017.

“Those types of crimes have replaced a lot of street crimes,” said LaBonia, who has been an officer in Danbury for 24 years. “They are very lucrative. They are somewhat challenging to investigate.”

He attributes the increase to the internet and the difficulty police face in catching the culprits.

“These scams have gotten much more organized,” LaBonia said. “As a result, they’ve increased. They are hard to catch people. They are a challenge to us.”

Officers often faces jurisdictional obstacles when trying to investigate, but collaborate with other departments and have had success with a software he described as the “Facebook of financial crime investigation” to share information and catch suspects.

Taken down the ‘garden path’

The Lyonses have lived in Danbury since 1971 and have three children and 10 grandchildren.

Elaine is a former ballet dancer and worked for 21 years for Boehringer Ingelheim. Joseph sang and danced on Broadway and later worked for Music Sales Corportation publishing company, rising to vice president of sales and marketing. Both have volunteered in the community.

“We’re not usually taken in,” Elaine said. “We’re not that type of people. We’re usually cautious.”

Elaine said the callers were convincing. The one who claimed to be their grandson said he had five stitches in his upper lip to explain why he might sound different.

The Lyonses were told not to call their daughter because their grandson wanted to explain the situation to his mother in person. “It sounded logical,” she said.

If they had called their daughter, they would have learned their grandson was at her house, Elaine added.

Although their grandson lives in New Milford, he has friends down South, so it was realistic that he could have been driving through Maryland, she said. The caller also identified himself by their grandson’s name, she said.

“I’d like to know how they had this much information,” Elaine said. “That’s a little frightening, too.”

The couple found the name of the attorney and his number on a list of lawyers in Maryland. They have since contacted the bar association in Maryland for an investigation.

A Google search of that attorney’s name turns up results on Lawyers.com and Avvo.com, but no number or client reviews were listed for the lawyer.

“The lawyer was very well-spoken,” Elaine said. “He was very organized. He knew what he was talking about.”

She said the couple spoke to the alleged attorney several times throughout the day, as the man claimed to go to court or put them on hold to speak to a client.

“He really took us down the garden path,” she said.

The couple was then urged to post bail. Shortly afterward, a courier wearing a polo shirt with some kind of company emblem appeared at the door and picked up the envelope of money, Elaine said.

“We were still in disbelief,” she said. “It wasn’t until evening, when we couldn’t reach him (the faux attorney) all of a sudden, we started to have some suspicions.”

She called Maryland hospitals, but no one had information on her grandson. She called the courthouse and detention center, but there was no record of him.

She then called Giannone, who said she appeared to have been scammed.

Precautions

People should be wary if they are not asked to sign paperwork, which bondsman usually have their clients do, Giannone said. “That would be a red flag,” he said. He urged people to never send cash through the mail.

“No bail bondsman will ever take cash unless it’s physically in person,” he said.

LaBonia said people should speak to relatives or someone else they trust before sending money.

He speaks at senior centers and assisted living facilities about this issue, but said it is a myth that only older people fall for these scams. Anyone can be tricked, he said.

“These people that do this are professionals,” he said.

Elaine said she hopes to help others so they do not fall pray to similar scams.

“We were scammed like this because it was so well-organized,” she said. “There are going to be other people that are drawn into it.”