Roughly 160 seconds.
That's how close Murray Jutras and his wife Donna came to losing $2,500 in what is commonly known as a grandparents scam.
On the morning of Oct. 11, Donna received a call on the couple's landline from a man claiming to be her grandson.
Murray said the man was “sobbing” and he told Donna he had been in an accident in Quebec and was in police custody.
Donna ended up unwittingly giving the man her grandson's name, he added.
“That's how it all started. They sucked the name out of Donna.”
The man said the police would not charge him but he needed money to cover the damage to the other vehicle and he added that his legal aid representative would call Donna back after she provided her cellphone number.
Roughly 15 minutes later, a man claiming to be Donna's grandson's legal aid lawyer called and told her the cost of covering the damage to a rental car her grandson had hit was $2,185; otherwise, charges would be laid.
The man told Donna the money had to be sent by cash or debit through Western Union to LaSalle, Que., to a man named Jacques Martin.
Murray said once Donna told him what had happened, he was suspicious.
“I said there's something rotten in Denmark here.”
But the couple's grandson had experienced some legal and financial trouble in recent months and they didn't know where he was working.
That uncertainly, coupled with the high emotions Donna was experiencing from the phone calls, pushed the couple to go ahead with the money transfer.
“I didn't really want to do it. I can't believe that I even allowed it to go on,” Murray said. “But it played on Donna's grandmom thing.”
He said he withdrew $2,500 from the bank and they went to the Western Union at the Olds Money Mart.
After sending the money, the couple returned home and were finally able to contact their grandson on his cellphone and learned he was in Olds.
Donna immediately contacted Money Mart and asked them to cancel the transaction, Murray said.
An employee said they could stop the transfer, he added, but only if they were in the office.
“We just bailed in the truck and went ripping down there,” Murray said, adding they were able to cancel the transfer. “We only caught it by two or three minutes, otherwise we would have lost the money.”
After leaving the Money Mart, the couple immediately headed for the Olds RCMP detachment to report what had happened.
While en route, the man who had claimed to be their grandson's lawyer in Quebec called and said something had gone wrong with the money transfer.
Murray said he and Donna decided to keep playing along so they could alert police and potentially have the scammers caught.
But, he added, the police never took his or Donna's name and did not write anything down.
Murray said he was frustrated the RCMP dismissed their complaint since he believed police may have been able to trace the cellphone calls or find video footage from the Western Union location in LaSalle from the time the man claiming to be the lawyer had called.
Regardless, he said he was happy he did not lose the $2,500 and that night, he heard from one of his friends in Olds who told him she was almost scammed out of $2,300 through the same scenario.
The woman, Murray said, had tried to send money through the Western Union outlet at the Olds Wal-Mart, but the outlet's security protocols would not allow the transaction to go through.
Staff Sgt. Joe Sangster, commander of the Olds RCMP detachment, said the detachment has received three complaints about such scams since the beginning of September and in one case a person did lose $6,000 after transferring money to a Western Union branch in Quebec.
He is holding a free awareness presentation on grandparents and other types of scams in council chambers at Olds Town Hall at 6:30 p.m. on Oct. 30.
The presentation will cover what to do and what not to do when people are asked to send money by people they don't know.
“If it's too good to be true, it probably is,” Sangster said. “If you suspect anything, ask questions. Ask (the police), ask the town itself, ask your bank that you're dealing with.”
He added every scam complaint that comes in to the detachment is sent to the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre.
Daniel Williams, a senior call taker supervisor with the centre, said the organization, which is jointly managed by the RCMP, the Ontario Provincial Police and the Competition Bureau of Canada, records all complaints it receives into a database where the information is analyzed and then passed on to the appropriate law enforcement or government agencies.
He said the centre receives thousands of calls about grandparents scams each year and these types of scams are a result of “very organized crime” where the people who are targeting Canadians are working in Canada and abroad.
The scammers are doing some research to track down seniors in affluent areas but in most cases, those responsible have minimal information and take a chance that they'll reach a senior,” Williams said.
Sometimes, they'll track down information about a person from online sources such as obituaries or family trees.
Most of the time, however, the scammers are “fishing,” he added.
“For folks who ask too many questions, those calls come to an end awful quick,” Williams said. “What the scammer loves is the thing of, ‘Hi grandma, I'm in trouble.' ‘Billy, is that you?' ‘Yeah, who else could it be but me Billy?'
“And of course they answer so readily, so professionally, that that senior will tell you, they'll swear two minutes later that Billy gave the name Billy.”
To report a scam to the centre, call 1-888-495-8501 or email [email protected].
