An elderly Greeley woman is raising awareness of online scammers after she lost $1,000 in a scam while she was recovering from COVID-19.
Margo Fresquez recently received an alert that someone tried placing an order on her Amazon account for a $1,400 iPhone. Fresquez, who is in the early stages of dementia and feeling the aftermath of her battle with COVID-19 in January, spoke on the phone with scammers. They convinced her they were agents from the Federal Trade Commission who handle scams.
“Sometimes if it’s in a panic situation, my brain can’t think and it doesn’t function,” Fresquez said. “And at that point, I went into panic mode and my brain shut down. I was still sick, and I couldn’t even stand, hardly.”
The scammers told her to go to a store such as Target to purchase $1,000 worth of gift cards. They assured her the next day that federal agents would come to the house with a cashier’s check so people couldn’t break into her accounts and steal money.
As a result, the sick and scared woman took out $1,000 from her Social Security, which was her whole paycheck to live on for the month. She fell for the scam in a moment of panic.
“I can’t believe I fell for this when they called,” she said. “So now I’ve learned another $1,000 bad lesson.”
Kell Hulsey, a sergeant for the Greeley Police Department’s investigations unit, said the gift-card scam approach is one of the most common scams across the state. If a person relays the information…
