By Jason Guy Mendenhall Founder, Utah Senior Care Advisors | Author, The Changing Face of Senior Living: What Every Family Needs to Know
In 35 years of working in and around senior care, I’ve watched more good people get taken advantage of than I can count. Not because they were naive. Not because they weren’t paying attention. But because the warnings their families gave them were always slightly out of date — and the next scam was already different.
Here’s what I’ve come to believe: warning seniors about specific scams doesn’t work. And if you’re doing it, I want to offer you something better.
Why Specific Warnings Fail
Every month there’s a new scam making the rounds. The Medicare impersonator. The grandchild in trouble. The IRS threatening arrest. The tech support pop-up. The Social Security number suspension. Each one arrives with slightly different details, a slightly different story, a slightly different phone number.
Families warn their parents about the scam they just heard about. Their parent nods. Then a different version comes along — with a different story — and none of the previous warning transfers. The details were the whole warning, and the details changed.
I’ve seen this play out in senior care settings too. In my book The Changing Face of Senior Living, I write about how financial exploitation of the elderly is more common than most families realize — and how it often comes not from strangers, but from people in trusted positions who understand how to apply pressure, create urgency, and isolate seniors from the people who love them. The machinery of manipulation, whether it’s a phone scammer or a predatory placement agency, runs on the same handful of levers.
Learn those levers once, and you’re protected from every version of the story.
The 5 Warning Signals That Cover Almost Everything
These haven’t changed in decades. Every scam — phone call, email, text, pop-up, or in-person — relies on at least one of them. Most use several at once.
1. Urgency
A real institution can always wait until tomorrow. A bank can wait. The IRS can wait. Medicare can wait. Social Security can wait.
Every scam has a deadline measured in minutes — because thinking is the one thing it cannot survive. The moment someone tells you that you must act right now or something terrible will happen, that pressure itself is the red flag. Legitimate organizations do not operate this way. Hang up, step away, and call someone you trust.
2. Secrecy
“Don’t tell your family — they’ll only try to stop you.”
No legitimate process anywhere asks you to hide what’s happening from the people who love you. Not a bank. Not a government agency. Not a law enforcement officer. Not a lawyer. Secrecy is the scam’s protection, not yours. The moment someone asks you to keep a conversation private from your family, that is your signal to end the call and tell your family immediately.
3. Unusual Payment Method
Gift cards. Cryptocurrency. A wire transfer to an unfamiliar account. A courier coming to your door to collect cash.
No bank, no government agency, no legitimate company — in any country — collects payment this way. Ever. Full stop. If someone asks you to pay in any of these ways, it is a scam. It doesn’t matter how convincing the story is, how official they sound, or what they say will happen if you don’t comply. Hang up.
4. Authority Impersonation
They say they’re from the IRS. From your bank’s fraud department. From Medicare. From the Social Security Administration. From a law firm. From Microsoft. From Apple.
Here’s what most people don’t know: caller ID and email sender addresses are trivially faked. Seeing a familiar name or number on your screen proves nothing about who is actually calling. Always hang up and call back on a number you already had — from the back of your bank card, from a paper statement, from the official government website. Never use a number they gave you, and never search for one while you’re still frightened, because fraudulent search results and paid listings are a real problem.
5. They Contacted You
You didn’t start it. The call came to you. The text arrived uninvited. The pop-up appeared. The email showed up.
This one alone isn’t proof of a scam — legitimate organizations do reach out sometimes. But it should reframe everything that follows. When someone contacts you out of the blue and then applies any of the other four signals, your guard should be fully up.
The One Rule That Covers All Five
If your parent remembers nothing else from this post, I want them to remember this:
Hang up and call back on a number that existed before they contacted you.
The number on the back of your bank card. The number on a paper statement. The number printed on your Medicare card. Not a number they gave you. Not one you found by searching while you’re still worried. Use a different phone if you have one, or wait a few minutes first — because in some cases, a caller can stay on a line you believe you’ve already hung up.
This one habit neutralizes almost every phone scam in existence. If it’s a real bank, they’ll answer. If it’s a real government agency, they’ll have a record of the contact. If no one answers — or if the story suddenly changes — you have your answer.
The Part That Actually Changes Behavior
Here’s what I want to say to adult children and caregivers: the list matters less than the conversation.
Don’t just forward this post to your parent. Sit down together. Pull up a few suspicious messages or emails on their phone — ones they’ve actually received. Go through them together and let them be the one to identify the signals. Let them say: “That’s urgency. That’s an unusual payment method. That’s secrecy.”
Being the expert is a completely different experience than being the person who keeps getting warned. People remember what they figured out themselves — not what someone told them to watch out for.
The goal isn’t to make your parent afraid of every phone call. It’s to give them a framework that makes them feel confident and capable — because they are. Most of the seniors I’ve worked with over 35 years are sharp, experienced people who simply haven’t been given the right mental model for recognizing this kind of manipulation.
A Word on Financial Exploitation in Senior Care Settings
Phone scams get most of the attention, but I want to name something that comes up repeatedly in my work: financial exploitation of seniors isn’t always a stranger calling from overseas. It happens in senior care settings. It happens through predatory referral agencies. It happens through people in positions of trust who use urgency, isolation, and authority to steer seniors — and their families — away from good decisions.
In my book I write about specific cases I’ve witnessed firsthand. The tactics are the same ones described above. Urgency. Secrecy. Authority. Unusual financial arrangements. The faces change. The machinery doesn’t.
If something feels wrong — whether it’s a phone call or a recommendation from someone in the senior care industry — trust that feeling. Call someone you trust. Get a second opinion. Take your time.
Share This With Someone Who Needs It
If you have an aging parent, grandparent, or someone you care about who is at risk — share this post with them directly. Better yet, print it out and go through it together.
And if you’re navigating senior care decisions in Utah — the communities, the costs, the advisors, the financing — I offer free consultations to families across the Wasatch Front. No pressure, no commission agenda, just an honest conversation from someone who has spent his entire life in this industry.