-It is my pleasure to welcome you
on behalf of the 960,000 members here
in the state of Washington and welcome you
to launch AARP's unmasking of the Imposters Campaign.
The campaign is a joint effort of AARP Washington
and several long-time organizational partners,
the Washington State Attorney General's office, Microsoft,
the Federal Trade Commission
and the Boeing Employees Credit Union.
This campaign that we're launching today
is designed to help people of all ages
spot fraudulent impostors in the marketplace.
While stopping fraud has been an important topic
for many years, several forces have converged
to make it even more important today,
and what was going on around the world this past week
is just another case
and evidence of the necessity of events like today.
One of those forces
is the emergence of sophisticated technology
that allows the bad guys to easily pretend
to be someone they are not.
In today's marketplace, a scammer can press a button
and robo-dial 100,000 households for very little expense,
and spoofing devices are often used to mask
the caller's phone number
so that even if you have caller ID,
you'll never know who's really calling.
Advances in technology have allowed scammers
to create fake web ads that claim to be able to scan
your computer looking for viruses,
and I'm sure most of us have had one or more calls like that,
when in fact they have malware embedded in them
that downloads viruses onto your computer.
Another force driving the rise in impostor fraud
is the global nature of today's marketplace.
Scammers from all over the world target Americans,
trying to sell us various fraudulent products
and services.
You'll see examples today when we describe impostors
calling from halfway around the world in places like India.
The global nature of these activities makes it hard
for law enforcement to catch these criminals.
A final factor that has made impostor fraud a hot topic
is the extent to which many of these scams prey
on our fears and anxieties.
Con men use fear to get us to act,
more accurately, react to their pitches.
Recent research by AARP and Stanford University
has taught us that when we are in a heightened emotional state,
we make poor financial decisions.
The swindler will try to manufacture
such heightened emotions to get us to take action.
Today, you're going to hear presentations
from some of the nation's top experts
on how to spot and prevent investor fraud.
Our goal is to provide you with concrete tools
you can use to protect yourselves
and your loved ones from these crimes.
One final note,
AARP research shows that you in this room today
are the least vulnerable when it comes to the kinds of things
we're going to be talking about today,
and the reason for that is, you're here.
You take the time to come to events like this.
You take the time to listen and read
and watch, educate yourself, raise your vigilance
and understanding of what's going on around you.
So my request of you is not just to take what you learn today
and apply it in your own lives, but talk to you family,
talk to your friends, talk to your neighbors,
share what you hear today and see today,
and let's get on top of this problem and do it together.
So I'd like to now introduce Doug Shadel,
who is the executive director
here in the state of Washington for AARP.
Doug?
[ Applause ]
-Thank you, Mike.
Wow, what a great turnout.
Thank you, all, for coming this morning
and for battling the traffic.
I understand there was a traffic situation down the road.
This is the launch, as Mike said, of our new campaign,
Unmasking the Impostors, and we are really fortunate
this morning to have Attorney General Bob
Ferguson with us, and by way of introduction,
I've got two things I want to do with Bob.
He can only be here for a short time
with us this morning, but I want to embarrass him
a little bit by both introducing him
and acknowledging some of the great work
he's done as our attorney general.
You know, I'm sort of embarrassed to admit this,
but I have worked with five attorney generals,
dating back to the 1970s.
Slade Gorton was the first AG I worked for,
and all of these folks have been wonderful public servants
committed to protecting us from harm.
But I have to admit, I have never seen,
I have never quite seen an AG work as hard to protect us
as Bob Ferguson has, and, you know,
I can't list all of the things that he has done,
but I want to point out a couple things that just,
in our world with protecting seniors,
he has done since being in the office.
One of the things I was just conferring with Shannon Smith,
who's the director of Consumer Protection --
Shannon, wave -- in the back,
is that since coming into office,
Bob has doubled the staff of the Consumer Protection division.
This is the part of the organization
that protects us from crime.
Doubled the staff, doubled the number of recoveries,
suing everybody from small-time con men
to multinational corporations
to protect us from these abusive practices.
A second thing I want to point out
is that he has been really supportive.
He's traveled with us every time we've done a campaign like this.
We're going to be in Kennewick next week.
We're going to be in Vancouver in the middle of July,
and he's been doing this every year
since he's been in office,
helping to get to people ahead of time
to prevent these kinds of crimes.
He's also been to our Fraud Fighter call center,
made calls, sat down and made calls
and even done PSAs, and the last thing
I just want to point out, we just got helped a little bit,
but, really, Bob did this, passed House Bill 1143,
which is the vulnerable adults legislation.
It was an AG request legislation
that protects vulnerable adults from abuse.
So we've decided this morning that, in short,
when it comes to protecting consumers,
there has really been no greater champion, in my experience,
than Attorney General Bob Ferguson.
Why don't you come up here, Bob? We want to give you an award.
Yes.
-Thank you. -Congratulations.
-Thank you.
-This is the Fraud Fighter of the Year award,
and we don't give these out lightly.
I think I've given out two before.
-Okay.
-"To Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson
for his relentless commitment to protecting consumers
from financial exploitation and abuse in the marketplace."
Thank you for all the work you've done.
-Thanks. Thank you.
-I'll just put this here for you.
-Okay, thank you.
Doug, thanks so much,
and it's great to be here to see all of you.
It's great to receive that award,
and as you might imagine, you introduced Shannon,
and we have another individual from our office,
Elena is here, as well.
They are the folks who really do all the work, right,
as you can all appreciate.
There's a team of folks in our Consumer Protection Division.
They are doing the work every day,
and Doug mentioned we've doubled the size
of our consumer protection team.
Shannon knows this.
My goal is to have the largest
Consumer Protection Division in the country,
the largest one for any -- Thank you very much --
for any attorney general in the country.
That's the goal.
That's where we're going, and I want you to know
there are no taxpayer dollars
involved in paying for that growth.
When we bring a lawsuit against a bad actor,
and they pay us a settlement or pay a penalty,
we send money to the state,
but we also reinvest back into our office.
So Shannon's salary, Elena's salary,
that's all paid for by bad actors
who are breaking the law who we bring to court.
We're a moneymaker for the state, right?
We're a moneymaker for the state.
And one more thing I just have to mention.
I have a few slide for you, and I do apologize
I have to slip out afterwards.
I have a flight I'm going to catch,
but Elena and Shannon are here in the back at a table,
who can answer any questions you have.
But you mentioned I did some calls at the call center once.
This is great.
So I was doing these calls, and I'm calling people up,
and it was a campaign, I think, to educate folks
about different scams that were out there.
So I called, this one lady answered the phone,
and I said, "Hello, my name is Bob Ferguson.
I'm your attorney general,
and I'm calling with some information for you,"
and she said, "I don't think you're Bob Ferguson."
And I said, "No, no, I really am.
I'm here at the call center."
She said, "I think this is a scam. You're" --
I literally tried to persuade her I was who I was,
but to her credit, to her credit,
she was suspicious that somebody was calling her up,
claiming to be the attorney general with information,
and she hung up on me.
That was what happened.
So I'm not sure if she's here today,
but I never did persuade her.
But, really, I appreciated her skepticism. Right?
I did because that was the theme today is:
Impostors, people who call and say they're someone
they are not, or it's an Internet scam.
We see it all the time,
and so I have a few slides to talk about a couple things
we've seen in our office that I wanted to share with you,
and I think in here there might even be a short video, as well,
and when that comes, hopefully I can click on it
so I can prepare you for it.
Okay, so, of course, I start any slide presentation
with a picture of me and my mother.
So that's me as a very young boy.
I'm not sure how old I am there.
My parents had a house on Queen Anne Hill.
So I grew up right here.
I'm a fourth-generation Washingtonian.
My mother is a retired public schoolteacher.
She taught special education in public schools,
in addition to raising seven children:
six boys and one long-suffering sister.
And so my mom is -- My father has passed away.
My mom is very much alive.
She turns -- There are cameras here
so I shouldn't say this on TV, but she's about to turn 89.
She's as sharp as she ever was.
But I have a picture of her here because she's new
to the Internet, relatively speaking, right,
but she wanted to learn how to e-mail and all that
because she's got grandkids,
and that's how the grandkids communicate,
and she wants to keep up on what's going on with her family,
her large family.
And so not long after I got elected attorney general,
I went by to visit her, just stopped by to say hello,
and she lives here in Seattle at a retirement community,
and I walked in, and she was at the computer.
And she said, "Oh, Bobby, I'm so glad you're here.
I've got a strange e-mail,"
and the e-mail was from a friend of hers.
I'll call her Sally.
Sally had written my mom an e-mail
saying she was traveling abroad.
She'd lost her passport, lost her wallet, right?
See, we got an educated crowd here, Doug.
They know where this is going, right?
And saying, hey, she needed $500.
Could my mom wire $500?
Now, my mom was suspicious.
She said, "I don't know if that's right."
She said, "I don't think Sally is traveling."
Now, keep in mind my mom is new to the Internet at this point.
Right?
I said, "Mom, I think it's probably a scam.
Someone has hacked into Sally's e-mail
and is sending out these e-mails to everybody on her list."
So my mom called Sally up.
Sally lives a mile away, and Sally, of course,
was at home and had no idea
that this has happened to her computer, had no idea.
Now do I think my mom would have fallen for it?
I don't think so, but she wasn't sure.
She hadn't seen one of those before.
She was new to the Internet, but the point is,
and I think to Mike's point about taking this information
and sharing it with others because, look,
not every 88-year-old grandmother
has a son who's the attorney general
stopping by to check on her at home.
Right? That's true, right?
A lot of folks do not have that,
and we talk to Mom about what we see out there.
She'd be in your camp of being more knowledgeable than most,
but please do share that information.
It is so important. Mike is absolutely right.
Okay, so I've got a couple -- Oh, and I do want to say,
on the award and the partnership,
that's a picture of Doug and I doing a TV interview.
It's been a tremendous partnership now for,
I think we're on our 50-year.
We are in the Tri-Cities, I think next week,
for exactly one of these events.
AARP does fantastic work.
They're really our best partner
that we have to educate folks on the front end
to avoid the really many heartbreaking stories
that we see all too often.
I just have to note I am, kindly, I think last year,
Doug gave me an honorary membership to AARP.
I'm not old enough. So I'm on.
So my wife Colleen, she's a few years younger than me,
but she can only put it off for so long.
She's now a member, as well.
Yeah. All right.
So our Consumer Protection Division, in 2016,
we received, as you can see,
tens of thousands of complaints to our office.
Right? People call. They write.
They e-mail with a huge range of concerns.
I just want to give you some --
a data point there on the scale of what we see.
Half of the consumer fraud victims
we see are over the age of 50.
I want to talk just about two scams.
There are many, and you'll hear others,
but just two that we see.
One that's especially difficult for us
to, frankly, find the bad actors,
and the other where we had a positive
outcome which I'll tell you about.
So first this recent scam, this IRS scam,
and this is where scammers call you up,
and they impersonate. They're an impostor.
They impersonate being an IRS agent,
and they demand payment for taxes owed.
I think it was Doug or Mike talking about, in a scam,
someone wants to get you in a heightened emotional state.
They want to make you afraid or nervous or concerned.
That's what these folks do.
You owe back taxes, and they will know
some of your personal information.
The caller ID itself will appear as if the IRS is calling.
Right?
So there are data points where you think,
"Oh, you this might be real," and, look, let's be honest.
Sometimes we can forget, go, "Did I really send those taxes?
Did I file all of them? Did I do it right?"
It's a confusing system.
They can also send e-mails and call multiple times,
and they can be really aggressive,
and folks all around the country will send them money.
The IRS does not do this.
The IRS will not ask for payment via prepaid debit card,
for example, or a wire transfer.
They don't involve law enforcement officers
or immigration authorities with their tactics.
They don't do that.
They do not use threats or attempt to bully you.
So if you get this call, hang up and report it.
Do report it to us, but this is very, very common,
all across the country, folks calling
and saying they're from the IRS.
So if you get that call, ignore that.
If you feel like there really might be something legitimate,
hang up and call the IRS up and ask them.
Right?
Then you know you're talking to someone who is legitimate.
I'll give you one more.
We see a lot of really egregious scams.
This one is up there in my book.
So this is again in the impostor category, right,
someone claiming to be someone they're not.
So this is an entity called the Christian Prayer Center,
and a Seattle man created a website
offering prayer services for a fee,
prayer services for a fee,
and so consumers put in requests for things like --
These are real examples, right, a husband fighting cancer,
a child facing a terminal illness.
Folks are in a desperate situation.
Hey, I believe in the power of prayer.
Right? I believe in it.
I bet many people in this room do.
I believe in that.
Folks are desperate.
Imagine you're facing a child with a terminal disease.
Your husband has cancer.
You're desperate.
You will do anything, right?
You will do anything, even if it's a long shot.
People sent money.
Here is what the web page looked like.
Right? I don't think you can really --
It might be hard to read the ones down here at the bottom,
but they have things like,
"My wife and I miraculously reconciled last November
and canceled our divorce proceedings.
Believe it was the power of prayer."
These are -- turned out to be fake testimonials,
right, at the bottom.
Everything about this tugging at your heart strings,
right, the little girl, right, praying?
"Post prayer requests and receive prayers
from thousands of Christians."
So the website actually created fake religious leaders.
These people did not exist.
So one was, I think the main one,
if I remember correctly, was Pastor John Carlson.
They gave him a name, Pastor John Carlson,
that this was the person in charge.
As it turned out, there really is a Pastor John Carlson
in Washington State.
He actually exists.
He has zero affiliation with this group,
and he stated he's received threats from consumers
once they realized this was all a scam.
Right?
Now I think the next video may go right into the audio.
I'm not sure if I have to click on it twice.
So the next one is a --
It's just it made national news, this case we brought.
So I think the next one is a video.
It might go right to it. If not, I'll click on it twice.
So I think I'm going to click one more time,
and I think there's a video here.
-This morning, authorities say this man,
Benjamin Rogovy, preyed upon more
than 100,000 unsuspecting victims
during a time of need by ripping them off
through his website, Christian Prayer Center.
The site is sort of online church,
complete with digital collection plate.
Every prayer came with a price tag of between 9 and $35.
That's a short snippet.
That's was "Good Morning America."
It got national attention on this thing.
So what they did was they offered
these continued blessings, this website,
and they also confused consumers into making recurring payments.
So you thought you were paying one time.
This, by the way, is very common.
Be cautious about this.
You think you're paying once,
but you're actually signing up for a recurring charge.
Just something to be aware of in general,
but that's what was going on here.
He ended up collecting more than $7 million, 7 million bucks.
Right?
He had another scam on the side
going which I'm going to spare you the details on,
but we brought a lawsuit, were successful.
Folks he scammed got money back,
or they had an option to send in a form, right, say,
"Hey, I want to get my money back."
Well, we felt some people might have thought,
hey, they really got what they wanted.
They asked for prayers,
and maybe they felt they got that,
but we set up a system where if someone wanted their money back,
they were able to get that as a result of what this guy did.
But that's an example of an impostor fraud.
-Did he go to jail? -He doesn't go to jail.
We have civil author-- Somebody asked, "Did he go to jail?"
We only have civil authority, right?
So our Consumer Protection, Shannon,
who leads that operation, we're a civil operation.
There are local law enforcement, your county prosecutors,
who can bring criminal charges against folks
if they see it's appropriate,
but we have that civil authority.
So just a last thing is, hey, to contact us and call us,
to e-mail us, to chat with Shannon or Elena in the back.
This is important for us and many, most, I suppose,
about the cases that we actually bring,
the investigations we start,
the cases we bring are based on complaints from consumers.
That's how we hear about it: complaints from consumers.
They call us up.
Shannon has meetings every week with her team.
They go through and track the number
of complaints that come in.
Now, you can see with tens of thousands of complaints,
we can't go after every single one,
but we go after a lot of them. And Doug is right.
We've double the numbers of cases we've brought,
doubled the numbers of recoveries we've brought,
and as a final thought, you know, as attorney general,
to me, Shannon knows this, there's no more important work
we do than consumer protection, protecting consumers out there.
Because the stories we see are truly heartbreaking,
and that's why we're growing the operation.
That's why we're going to continue to grow it,
to make it the largest Consumer Protection Division
in the country, period.
That's my goal.
Few things in the world get me more upset
than someone like that guy at the Christian Prayer service.
It really angers me.
It really does.
My mom has friends at her retirement community
who have fallen victim to the kids
of frauds we're talking about.
So I know that sometimes it's easy to think,
particularly if you're educated, is that, "Hey,
I would never fall for that. I would never fall for it."
I'm just telling you,
I've met my mom's friends who have fallen for it.
These are smart capable people with successful careers,
now retired, who are as sharp as they've ever been,
but they get put in a heightened emotional state,
and they fall for it,
and they regret it as soon as they did it.
Right?
So do share the information you learned today
with your friends, with your family.
It'll go a long way, and I really appreciate
all of you being here today.
It's great to see you. Have a great day.
Thanks so much.
[ Applause ]
♪♪